PAX AMERICANA: SEPTEMBER 11 MEMORIALIZATION AND NATION-BUILDING MYTHOLOGIES

(Spine title: Pax Americana: September 11 Memorialization and Mythologies)

(Thesis format: Monograph)

by

Elle Kwok-Yin Ting

Graduate Program in Media Studies

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada

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•+• Canada THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO SCHOOL OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor Examiners

Dr. Tim Blackmore Dr. Susan J. Warwick

Supervisory Committee Dr. Regna Darnell

Dr. Sasha Torres Dr. Sasha Torres

Dr. Jonathan Vance Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford

The thesis by

Elle Kwok-Yin Ting

entitled

Pax Americana: September 11 Memorialization and Nation-Building Mythologies

is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board Abstract

This dissertation explores the ways in which post-9/11 memorial objects and spaces generate ideological capital to contribute to the attendant myths of wartime nation-building. Memorials are the material product of the state-driven enterprise of re-establishing a system of order that is threatened by the spectacular deconstruction that terror introduces. Order, however illusory, is organized in opposition to the entropic elements held out by the established boundaries of a nation (for a nation—any nation—is constructed through exclusionary practices that separate Us from Them); when a surge invades the national membrane, the act of memorializing is also one of border compensation and restoration. The work of this dissertation is to examine, through close reading and analysis, texts that represent instances of mythic, nationalistic rebuilding: the common thread that ties together popular memorial texts, such as the New York Times publication Portraits 9/11/01 and Jessica Lynch's biography

I Am a Soldier, Too, with sites for public grieving (Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville) is a unified insistence on a patriotic interpretation of events that have taken place since 9/11. I expect to find the same thematic preferences in these memorial objects towards nation-building ideals (of innocence, righteousness, vengeance) that channeled into the larger myths of American exceptionalism to become foundational concepts for the global War on Terror; these artefacts' selection and construction allow the nation an unproblematic understanding of its past, present, and intended events, and will predictably

iii continue to suppress domestic dissention and provide the conflict with the necessary ideological energy to continue.

Keywords: Memorials, World Trade Center, Pentagon, Shanksville, popular culture, media representation of 9/11, War on Terror, Deleuze and

Guattari, exceptionalism, patriotism, New York Times, United 93, Jessica Lynch

IV Acknowledgements

I can no other answer make...

Many thanks to the faculty and staff of FIMS at the University of Western

Ontario, both past and present, who took care of me from those first bewildering days in London up to the current (only slightly less bewildering) process I now face concluding my studies. What a grand, crazy adventure it has been!

I extend my gratitude also to the supervisory committee members whose guidance and faith made the realization of this project possible: Carole Farber, for her uncanny ability to know exactly what was needed anywhere and at any given time, and whose insight helped establish the foundation for this work; and

Sasha Torres and Jonathan Vance, who have always been available with valuable advice and jaw-droppingly great information that helped wrangle the material into something resembling a finished dissertation.

Special thanks go out to Tim Blackmore, my academic supervisor, mentor, and dear friend: to paraphrase a line from Forgetting Sarah Marshall (that modern classic!), for putting up with me for as long as he has, he deserves a medal, or a holiday, or at least a cuddle from someone. Whatever I now do well as an instructor and as a scholar I credit to his inspirational example.

With a grateful heart I also thank my family for their unfailing support and understanding: to the mums and dads, I send a googolplex of thanks for their love and acceptance and for keeping me grounded (of course, the free pet-sitting

v was a welcome perk also). Eon, you are still the most likeable capitalist I know, and I'm not just saying that because I'm your sister.

My friends unfailingly came to my rescue with their warmth, humour, and well-timed Showgirls parties—thanks to all. Tom and Darcie need special mention here: over the past two decades, the laughter and good times we have shared have sustained me in unhappy hours and, the rest of the time, have made life that much sweeter and more entertaining.

Jason, whenever things came up Milhouse, you almost always had something to do with it. You are my best friend and my life's metronome.

Thanks as usual—see you in the kitchen.

vi Contents

Certificate of examination ii Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Contents vii Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: Second Lives: Portraits 9/11/01 and the Democracy 49 of Death Chapter Three: Charm Defensive: The Pentagon Memorial and 88 Administered Memory Chapter Four: Pimp My Dump: Ground Zero's Makeover and the 140 WTC Rebuild Project Chapter Five: Passengers Only: Mastery of Flight 93's Myth through Heroic Narrative 194 Chapter Six: Beauty is Truth: Jessica Lynch and the Reimagining of the Hero 231 Conclusion 271 Works Cited 284 Curriculum Vitae 303

VII Chapter One

Introduction

The dominant expression exclaimed breathlessly by so many after the

September 11 attacks was "It didn't seem real," and certainly, even speaking several years later of planes-turned-weapons and the unimaginable destruction that took place at the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, there linger collective disbelief and free-floating insecurity in America. The legacy of the first terrorist attacks on the continental U.S. is a shattered understanding of the nation itself; suddenly the exceptional ism and impunity that America had realized as the normal state of affairs—its domestic safety, its highmindedness, and its Manifest

Destiny—had been radically and unquestionably checked. Genuinely shocked by the hostile spectacle of the attacks and their asymmetrical nature, the nation acted defensively on all fronts, including that of ideology. Thus, the War on

Terror was a fuller rendition of a war of ideas mobilized domestically as a means of rebuilding stability in a home environment faced with its potential for self- destruction. The viral pattern of attack saw the erasure between tools and weaponry; planes, box cutters, and even the postal service underwent a theatrical reinvention in the attacks to become instruments of terror. Moreover, those who executed the attacks lived amongst the innocents within national borders. The boundaries between inside/outside, self/other, secure/insecure spaces, once taken for granted, had to be re-evaluated and, more importantly, rebuilt as efficiently as possible. Faith had been shaken and badly needed to be

1 restored: as a country living under the undefined, undeterred threat of terrorism,

the U.S. faced the task of reconstructing its innocence. The tribute, and more

specifically, the memory that is both its inspiration and its objective, assists in the

formation of grand narratives and myths of exceptionalism that are the foundation

of American innocence.

Before moving any further into my argument, which has as its theoretical fulcrum the notion of exceptionalism, it is necessary first to outline how this dissertation applies and conceives of this term. I refer here to exceptionalism in the a priori sense to describe the set of practices, specifically in the United States

as it existed under the Bush administration after the September 11 attacks (and

as it continues to shape ideas and actions in the current order), that hinged on

using nationalistic myths to regenerate and "sell" an understanding of collective

identity that imply a "special" standing in the world community and, therefore, could legitimize unilateral actions as both necessities and entitlements. This definition of exceptionalism also conforms to an conceptualization of the state as a system of tendencies and corresponding apparatuses that constitute "lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories" (Deleuze and Guattari 3); these lines of movement and organization, while consistent with the hierarchical dynamics of power that bring a state into being in the first place, are more easily discerned in the extremity of wartime, when the delineations and assemblages of the state are most threatened and, consequently, the confirmation of an exceptional status becomes most important.

2 As it happened, the time frame during which I completed this project saw the occurrences of several state-threatening events. One notable example took

place the summer of 2005, as I began the writing proper for this dissertation;

London, England emerged from terrorist attacks that struck its transit systems

and exacted casualties of approximately 700. Again, the warnings were sounded that terrorism had made all the world unsafe, and predictably questions arose in the American media about national safety. [It is interesting, too, to note the virtual overshadowing of UK events by the paranoiac self-questioning that arose in the wake of 7/7 and the later failed attacks on July 21.] Despite the rapidity of action in the UK—the search and roundup of suspects in the second attack—the

Homeland Security colour-coded safety watch "across the pond" in the U.S. was promptly upgraded to Orange, indicating that clearly a sensitive nerve had been struck. American spectators of the War on Terror, who were leaning under the fatigue of a two-year period of post-Shock and Awe pullout in Iraq, were at once reminded of the immediacy of the problem. The manner in which Terror appears, disappears, and reappears characterizes its internal paradox, one that demonstrates its simultaneous resistance and entanglement within state-drawn boundaries. Even while terror is for so many reasons the foil to state logic, it also

(more effectively than anything the state can conjure up for itself) reinforces the policies of the state and provide golden opportunities for tightening hegemonic dominance and creating a wartime psychology that is conducive to martial rule under the guise of community and a shared self-evident, commonsense objective:

3 For the modern State defines itself in principle as "the rational and

reasonable organization of a community": the only remaining particularity

a community has is interior or moral (the spirit of a people), at the same

time as the community is tunneled by its organization toward the harmony

of a universal (absolute spirit). The State gives thought a form of

interiority, and thought gives that interiority a form of universality: "The

goal of worldwide organization is the satisfaction of reasonable individuals

within particular free States.... Always obey. The more you obey, the

more you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other

words yourself... (Deleuze and Guattari 375-376)

Myth has a fundamental role in the legerdemain that substitutes a sense of "pure reason" for hegemonic control, and that is its factoring as the higher calling or moral spirit that the state invokes in its march towards perfect community. In the case of the tribute moment, the familiar highmindedness of war rallies uniform action towards goals and the directive of doing one's part; the scenario of community participation is, of course, expected in times of domestic insecurity, as

Paul Fussell illustrates in his description of "morale culture":

One way to assure yourself of worthiness was to pitch in, to abandon

disbelief, sarcasm, pessimism, or any sign of heterodoxy, and to play the

game with sincerity and devotion. Performing your duty had immense

consequences.... Wartime was a moment when everyone felt obliged to

instruct others in ethics. (168)

4 Tribute culture is the morale culture that Fussell describes; it is an "ideological vacuum" in which "there develop[s] a sense that sheer unverbalized action on behalf of the common cause would somehow substitute for formulations of purpose or meaning" (Wartime139, my italics). Morale culture hinges on the symbolic power of constructed and adaptable meaning, the conflation of semiological value with "fact," and the deliberate misnaming that takes place in

"an atmosphere where presentation replaces actuality" (Fussell 154). In the

September 11 tribute lies the material trace of America's renewed investment in what John Shelton Lawrence terms "rituals of innocence": "9-11 has added new kinds of rituals that define America's special place in the moral universe...rituals

[that] present a compassionate, humanitarian face...[and] deepen the emotional commitment to war" (unpublished essay, 2).

If one settles upon the understanding, as Roland Barthes does, that "myth is depoliticized speech" (143, Barthes's italics), then its place as a singular vacuum within the chaos of a post-traumatic nation after 9/11 needs to be investigated with an eye to its role in statist reaffirmation. The power of myth is the symbolic load of meaning superimposed as truth, the real, or the natural; as

Barthes puts it most succinctly, it is "a conjuring trick....Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact" (142-143). The useful application of myth in nation-building can be discovered in Barthes's suggestion that myth is a way of speaking over things, of formulating a hyperreality that is friendly to the state's

5 purpose and self-perpetuation. In this sense, myth helps the state put its house

in order after its stability, security, and credibility take a blow from the designs of terrorism, which "is always of the real" (Baudrillard 47) and which threatens to

collapse the useful mythologies that allow the state holistic self-perpetuation.

Nationhood, on the other hand, is a gathering of these productive myths into a simulation of reason and order out of random elements; nationhood as

hyperreality is not merely a symptom of the War on Terror environment, for it

proceeds the threat of Other, even anticipates its hostility in its formulae.

Nevertheless, the visibility of nationhood and its importance are elevated in a wartime climate.

The reason for invoking Barthes and, to an equal extent, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Zizek within the discussion of myth that takes place in this dissertation (and not, say, Joseph

Campbell or Northrop Frye) is the versatility towards illuminating everyday apparatuses that their work shares. While Campbell and Frye explore myths and archetypal models as these apply to literatures—and remain important, even

"fashionable"1 for their contributions to this particular dialogue—I believe that an interrogation of myth as a response (or set of responses) to the stimuli of terrorism demands a greater theoretical reach than these works are capable of allowing. The same rationale explains why I have left out later mythologists such as John B. Vickery and K. K. Ruthven, whose Myth and Literature (1966) and

Myth (1976), respectively, continue the investigations into the literary applications

1 George Lucas has mentioned on a few occasions that the writing of Joseph Campbell is the key inspiration for his work, especially on the Star Wars franchise. 6 of myth; heavyweights such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss have also been "snubbed," mostly in the interest of brevity here, but also because my own examinations of myth after September 11 are less interested in the fundamental structure and dynamics of myths than in their contemporary content, applications, and consequences against the backdrop of imminent, continuous war. This may all seem like much to leave out of the conversation, but what my theoretical cherry-picking gives up in diversity I expect will be made up by a conciseness towards the topic at hand. Nevertheless, this dissertation is not meant to offer any sort of meta-theoretical approach to what myths are or are not; instead, its use of preferred theoretical materials is included to assist in accounting for tendencies and tandem reactions that occur when war makes certain myths politically necessary.

A look into the immediate, real-life problems of myth needs to start with what it leaves out of itself. Terrorism represents much of what myth fails to take into account or to hammer into place successfully, and Baudrillard, motivated by the 9/11 attacks, describes the incomprehensibility of the terror spectacle as a supreme defiant act that leaves its witnesses impotent:

We try retrospectively to impose some kind of meaning on it, to find some

kind of interpretation, but there is none. And it is the radicality of the

spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle, which alone is original and

irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle

upon us. And, against this immoral fascination (even if it unleashes a

universal moral reaction), the political order can do nothing. This is our

7 theatre of cruelty, the only one we have left—extraordinary in that it unites

the most extreme degree of the spectacular and the highest level of

challenge.... It is at one and the same time the dazzling micro-model of a

kernel of real violence with the maximum possible echo—hence the purest

form of spectacle—and a sacrificial model mounting the purest symbolic

form of defiance to the historical and political order. (Spirit 30)

Terrorism, by defying systems of dominance at a maximal level, represents what the state cannot absorb. Its surges of resistance notwithstanding, its very existence is a cause of distress for the state; it is the war machine, the nomad that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari posit as that which forever escapes, to some degree, the state's apparatuses of capture: "[the war machine] seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere.... In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus" (352). Despite the dichotomy that exists, the state and the nomad (the war machine) are necessarily defined in their opposition to one another, and consequently, are linked by the borders that they simultaneously sustain and share. The state, in order to be a collective body, must define its margins and, by doing so, introduces a gathering location for "fringes or minorities that reconstitute equivalents of the war machine—in sometimes quite unforeseen forms—in specific assemblages" (366); terrorism exemplifies one of these "specific assemblages," and the terror attacks that erupted in the United States in 2001, and much more recently in England, characterize the difficulties that the state

8 faces in the "short revolutionary instant[s] [and] experimental surge[s]" in

maintaining its own limits and boundaries against a restless Outside. The state,

in upholding its mythologies, permanently resists that which is nomadic, the

"force that destroys both myth and its copies, the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the

Right" (377); the force of the nomadic war machine is inevitable given its positioning outside state constructs as an intrinsic factor of the equation of power between these bodies.

Moreover, I would extend Barthes's logic of myth to ways of seeing and being seen, of the dynamics of visibility and concealment that play out the constructions and reconstructions of nationalist mythologies. Central to the myth of innocence spun around the United States and its exceptionalism are the use and restriction of image. Barthes's notion of "Operation Margarine" is an elaboration of the relationship between showing and hiding in terms of State authority in which "One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one.... A little 'confessed' evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil" (42). Hence the speed with which the Patriot Act and other

"counterterrorist" measures were passed, steps with obvious costs to people's individual freedom that were successfully sold as necessary evils in insuring public security; yet, these costs were not clearly articulated and were passed off as an insignificant inconvenience rather than an encroachment on civil liberties long accepted as a given—such liabilties were simply overlooked. Homer

Simpson decides that "Everything looks bad when you remember it," but it may

9 be more accurate to assume that everything looks the way "it's supposed to" when one remembers it, at least at the tribute or memorial level.

Memorialization, paradoxically, counts on a calculated forgetting as much as, or perhaps more than, remembrance; Deleuze and Guattari put forth the idea that

"there is no history but of the majority, or of minorities as defined in relation to the majority" and underscore the intersection of history and memory with power:

"Doubtless, there exists a molecular memory, but as a factor of integration into a majoritarian or molar system. Memories always have a reterritorialization function" (294). The tendency of myth is towards systemic reterritorialization, so its relationship with the management of information, and more specifically the collective memory, is in many ways a natural one; by domesticating memory, it becomes possible to inflate, purposefully, the reach of mythic signification. Life becomes a great deal more organized under such a scheme, all the better to mobilize bodies and minds towards a war. Within the simple but all- encompassing contradiction seen under the constructed grand narrative of

American innocence, the more complicated issues of wartime lie outside the reasoned framework and stay unanswered.

The Us-Them dichotomy that has been mobilized with the War on Terror is itself a product of image and spectacle. Precisely because the efficacy of terrorism lies in its ability to exploit the propaganda of the act, the reaction to the

September 11 attacks via the tribute has been an answer in kind: a spectacle of national myth and self-rendering. The tribute deftly juxtaposes myths of innocence and patriotism against the righteous vengeance exacted upon the

10 terrorist enemy, but in doing so actually mimics the logic of its terroristic referential. In "The Exercise of Limits," Paul Virilio describes the need for the propaganda of the act and the role of the media in constructing consciousness:

"Without the transmission of the image in the sensational press, the exercise of limits would make no sense, for...'even suicide becomes absurd if it does not cause someone distress, it is nothing more than a flight into the void'" (Desert

Screen 29). There is, of course, the obvious if-a-tree-falls parallel in terrorism, but also the response of wars that Baudrillard asserts "[do] not take place." War, too, is a visual concern, and the centrality of the virtual to the building of myth has much to do with the psychology of wartime, during which "Belief in anything was easy, so long as the thing believed in seemed noble and supported the

Allied cause" (Fussell 165).

One speaks publicly of honouring the troops with only a tacit, shared understanding that they are killing for a good cause: Our safety. There is a show of strength, but with it the reminder that We "are the Good Guys," that "God is on our side." What Paul Virilio describes as "the exhibitionism of a total terrorist war" consists not only of a show of force but also moral ground; the

Shock and Awe campaign that signaled the heroic beginnings of the second Gulf

War also heralded the supremacy of appearances in the War on Terror. The thrust behind righteous aggression is a sense of predetermined victory; much as the medieval champion attributed his loss or failure to providence, there is much of the divine in fighting (and "winning") the War on Terror. Construction of tributes partakes of this notion of divine favour, and not surprisingly tributes, both

11 official and populist, share a monolithic understanding of justice; indeed, it is in part the purpose of the tribute to promote productive ideas of justice, innocence, and revenge that grease the wheels of the U.S. war machine, and I cannot help but repeat here Oscar Wilde's quip that morality "is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike." Untarnished moral character is the privilege, too, that one gifts oneself with in myth, and the desire to justify actions that are untenable under the overriding home front mythologies only encourages the further development of myth.

The terrorism spectre, from its place outside of State structure and myth represents a continual threat to these hegemonic systems, for as Paul Virilio hypothesizes, more than once, that to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck, hegemonic organization implies its demise in its nomadic opposite simply by being. Subsequently, a state's power runs inverse to its very survival; its ascent, as such, is suicidal in Baudrillard's view:

No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for

perverse, unintended effects. Very logically—and inexorably—the

increase in power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party to its

own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression

that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with their

own suicides.... The West, in the position of God (divine omnipotence and

absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared war on

itself. (Spirit 7)

12 Baudrillard assumes that the bodies of the State operate with a silent, perhaps unknowing complicity in their self-destruction and that, "If this is not taken into account, the event [the terrorist act] loses any symbolic dimension. It becomes a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics, and that all would remain would be to eliminate them" (5). And while the death-wishing of the State remains an unverifiable psychic object, certainly its aggressive resistance against those it has put outside its perimeter attests to a perpetual, if not futile, struggle of the magnitude that Baudrillard describes. The

War on Terror cannot be won, and the State as Coalition Forces understands its fatalistic mission enough to change the proportions of myth around this inconvenience: there is no victory, only "progress," or rather, the myth of progress. Progress, unlike a flat-out win, requires no results; it is a promissory note, a victory IOU that need never be paid. (I am reminded now of an unlikely analogy: The Grim Reaper's pathetic losses in the games Battleship and Twister for the souls of slackers Bill and Ted in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey [1991] seem to be unending, for the conditions of victory keep changing—"Best five out of seven?" ask Bill and Ted—"Damn straight!" is the Reaper's indignant reply.

When one cannot win, there is always the option of keeping the game going as a method of deferring imminent defeat.) Meanwhile, the war is free to continue its search for punishable culprits; such is a search made all the more necessary and desperate by its own anticipated empty-handedness. Again, there is only substitution wherein progress stands in for victory and the search replaces the find. The search, too, is mythic machinery put in place to stretch out the promise

13 of progress broadly enough to conceal a war that continues to thrust against its

borders in search of the inevitable "minoritarian groups...prohibited, in revolt, or

always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for

being extrinsic, in other words, anomic" (Deleuze and Guattari 247).

For the purposes of current foreign policy, terrorism is defined as an

emergent threat: "The United States of America is fighting a war against

terrorists of global reach. The enemy is not a single political regime or person or

religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism— premeditated, politically motivated

violence perpetrated against innocents" (National Security Strategy n.p.). In truth, however, terrorism remains a vague, poorly understood entity; the U.S.

strategy is a prototypical statist strategy in that it does not act but react against terror. The nature of terrorism precludes a true pre-emptive strike; its resistance

represents the truest evolution of asymmetrical warfare technique.

Consequently, all the cautionary measures that the U.S. has specifically taken

have been little more than a protracted knee-jerk to the attacks and the war

machine that it imagines behind them. What the state can wrest into

manageability is appearance—myth, in other words, offers the simulacra of what cannot be realized: progress, as mentioned above, but also the safety and moral victory that is promised and "seen" on the horizons of a prolonged war. The program of Homeland security and its pronounced alarmist gestures (the colour- coded rating system, the call for survival provisions such as plastic sheeting for windows, homeland security manuals—see Readv.gov for further examples) is a prime example of how fear-mongering meets the task of diverting public attention

14 away from the state's decided insecurity and provides some superficial comfort in an attempt at self-protection. There is panic, yes, but this is condensed into

merely a controlled alarm that convinces all that the threat they cannot capture or even identify with any success is nevertheless a manageable one, and that by following certain [martial] directions they can preserve themselves. Security programs are the sound and fury that appear in lieu of the terrible vacuum of powerlessness against an "unspecified enemy": "'multiform, maneuvering and omnipresent... of the moral, political, subversive or economic order, etc.,' the unassignable material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms" (Deleuze and Guattari 422). These nomadic multiplicities nevertheless drive the State's equipment of war even as they escape capture or firm definition; what is left, then, is a set of actions that spawn corresponding reactions. Terror, reduced to an after-the-fact designation, is a faceless threat that is exponentially more terrifying, but in its increased threat, also made more politically useful. In noting the wording of the National Security Strategy, one sees the proverbial bullet that the policy dodges in defining the unknown quantity that is terrorism:

In many regions, legitimate grievances prevent the emergence of a lasting

peace. Such grievances deserve to be, and must be, addressed within a

political process. But no cause justifies terror. The United States will make

no concessions to terrorist demands and strike no deals with them. We

make no distinction between terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or

provide aid to them. (National Security Strategy)

15 Terror is a suggested danger whose forms, characteristics, and expectations go unnamed; so, too, is the nature of those who commit terror or their demands.

Defining terrorists and their work in terror becomes the platform for a different sort of political commitment, one that invests itself in the "politics of gesture" (Der

Derian 72) and is espoused with imposing a hyperreal rendition of the Good War.

The tribute finds its place as an essential gesture, one that characterizes the architecture of the simulated Good War crusade.

A tribute is popularly recognized as an expression of respect and admiration, and certainly in the case of the post-9/11 tribute these emotions set the tone for how events and people are remembered and interpreted. However, the notion of tribute has in its heritage another, perhaps more instructive meaning when looking at the memorialization of September 11: tribute, etymologically and conceptually, evolved from the practice of forcing payment from a nation in exchange for peace. Consequently, tribute originated as payment given under the threat of the sword (especially as a form of insurance against becoming a victim of said sword), and in inspecting the role that tributes play in nation- building following September 11, war quite unsurprisingly continues to motivate the exaction of tribute. Tribute is an ideological weapon for emerging victorious in the hearts-and-minds struggle that accompanies a nation at war; it is a way to sell a war through exhibition and enact a retaliatory form of symbolic violence against the terrorist enemy, and as such, it largely characterizes and drives the

War on Terror. The production and consumption of tribute goes well beyond recording a moment in history; it represents a "correct" rendition of events and

16 acts significantly towards the construction of this official version. In materially tracing the conceptualization of ideas such as selfhood and terroristic otherness, the tribute aligns its content along a propaganda aesthetic and subsequently contributes much to the U.S. domestic counterstrike of aggressive ideological rewiring. Tribute, then, takes its place among other, more overtly aggressive means of mass education; propaganda is an agent for pursuing war in the name of peace and smoothing over the bumps encountered in this incongruous pairing.

It is also a price from which no one is exempted freely within or without American borders; George W. Bush's famous "with us or with the terrorists" edict drew the figurative line in the sand, and tribute places one safely within the correct side of the line and identifies subversives to its logic.

The tribute shibboleth of Lest We Forget powerfully demonstrates the rhetoric of nationalism and, more specifically, of nation-building. The "We" spoken of signifies a united America; the American self is legion, as one was consistently reminded by the Ad Council's series of public service announcements, "I Am an American"

(www.adcouncil.org/campaigns/historic_american/). The public proudly celebrated what it saw as its uniquely American character after September 11, and not surprisingly there was extensive self-identification with values such as heroism (especially of the rugged, everyday sort), innocence, and resilience.

However, much of the emotive resonance behind the emphatic post-Terror rise of patriotic sentiment was geared towards a performance of righteous indignation; as a result, the concept of Us was organized around an agenda of revenge rather

17 than forgiveness. Us, then, as a label of self, implies its opposite, and in the case of the American collective following the attacks, the construction of the enemy accompanied any reckoning of national identity. As well, because the terrorist Other is not a State-based entity (that is, terrorism is not attributed to any one nation or character—though this assumption, too, is largely debatable when looking at certain U.S. security actions and reactions), the terrorist threat is protean, a one-label-fits-all condition that has at least partly rescued U.S. political credibility despite what has been a long and unproductive War on Terror.

Terrorism is an impressionistic label, which despite the U.S. government's now notorious self-proclamation of a "failure of imagination" in maintaining national security prior to the 9/11 attacks, is the product of a strongly imaginative exercise, albeit an unconscious process; the Otherness constructed in this case must, after all, live up to being The Cause for a moral crusade. The rendering of the terrorist Other takes its form in opposition to American nationalism post-9/11, and in terms of self-identification, what the tribute omits is at least as important as what it offers. There is on the one hand an insistence on what Americans should remember—Lest We Forget—but there is also the implication that We are always threatened by the "radical subjectless subversion" that is terrorism. In this line of thought, the logical conclusion is the call for a face to create and hold up to the invisible threat: Them.

The They of terrorism is frequently invoked in the tribute as a convenient catch-all expression for directing the fear and hatred following the attacks towards a "higher purpose." The Other in the War on Terror, as not-Us, lies

18 outside the province of human character and dignity. The terrorists are

"monsters" capable of unspeakable evil and who will win if we let Them, namely if

We forget—forget our heroes, our human costs, and our duty to fight the War on

Terror. The tribute is careful to maintain the barrier between the American self and the terrorist Other; difference is achieved and sustained by the frequent reminders of what They did versus a strategic and willful ignorance of any humanizing costs carried by the other side. While the dead of 9/11 are alluded to as heroes, murder victims (the temporary memorial at Ground Zero insists upon the murderous intent of the attacks on the WTC), and innocents, the dead perpetrators are unforgivingly demonized as murderers and freaks. As the War on Terror mobilized and the U.S. and its Coalition forces took civilian lives, these casualties were quickly dismissed as strategic and even justified; an incalculable number, of course, simply went unreported for what should be quite obvious reasons: the War on Terror, as a moral crusade, cannot be identified with the slaughter of innocent people. Likewise, even while the Other is presented as a disposable sub-human (or is otherwise simply omitted altogether) in much of the tribute industry's output, there is also caution over how and when such a sentiment is expressed because of the image damage or dissonance that could occur when We are seen committing acts of violence. Hence, the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are treated as aberrations in the

War on Terror; by attributing the actions to a few abnormal individuals, the war can continue to run on its sense of moral superiority, untroubled by reports of

19 inappropriate behaviour, and Their costs remain the anonymous costs of the war's mistakes.

Furthermore, the Other as Abnormal becomes the justification for any

move made towards a "correction" of social deformity. How abnormality

becomes defined and managed by the state feeds directly into its agenda of

limitless surveillance and control; the witch-hunting and determined "weeding out" of undesirables of the post-traumatic nation is likely the clearest manifestation of

its self-bordering and the struggle to regain control, for as Foucault observed,

[i]n a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it

individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels,

to fix specialties and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to

another. It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions

within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the

rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of

measurement, all the shading of individual differences. (Discipline and

Punish 184)

Domination relies upon the monolithic certainty that normalcy provides and upon the margins that reflect norms and, conversely, abnormality. The reduction of the in-group of a nation to homogeneity makes the task of definition manageable.

The fixing of labels is, then, a "technique of power," and makes it possible to exercise state control; tributes operate to sustain these measurements and create an environment that is conducive to the state's objectives of domination.

The easy agreement over what constitutes proper tribute and Our community

20 network as givers and receivers of tribute messages is key to establishing such consensus over meaning, and by logical extension, over thought and understanding, which is why Constantin and Laurene Boym's work (the

"Buildings of Disaster" series, which includes the WTC) is relegated to "ghoulish kitsch" (Macaulay n.p.) while the Tribute in Light (see below) is meant to consolidate individual grief into an expression of national character.

How the tribute manages to educate on a massive scale is evidence of its untouchable character. With its aura of inviolability, the tribute is well beyond reproach; one cannot question the message or the motivation of the 9/11 tribute, for doing so would constitute the great post-September 11 sin of non-patriotism.

Here, uncooperativeness of any sort is branded un-American; to criticize the tribute is to betray one's prescribed cause as an American at war with terror.

Again, it is fitting to refer to Bush's ultimatum of being with Us or with the terrorists, and indeed, the tribute is a tacit and continual allusion to the separation of self and enemy. In helping to sustain the garrison thinking necessary for the formation of national community, tributes work according to the combative logic of citizenship, which Chantal Mouffe outlines in The Return of the Political:

Once it is accepted that there cannot be a "we" without a "them" and that

all forms of consensus are by necessity based on exclusion, the issue can

no longer be the creation of a fully inclusive community where antagonism,

division and conflict will have disappeared. Hence, we have to come to

terms with the very impossibility of a full realization of democracy. (85)

21 Ernesto Laclau elaborates upon a related formulation of citizenship and its

particular relationship with hegemony in Power and Social Communication by suggesting, as Marx had previously, that the notion of community itself is a

hegemonic designation:

All groups are peculiarities within the social, structured around specific

interests. But they only become hegemonic when they take up the

representation of the universality of the community conceived as a whole.

The question is, of course, how such a representation is possible... "For

the revolution of a nation and the emancipation of a particular class of civil

society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the state of the

whole society, all the defects of society must be concentrated in another

class, a particular class must be looked upon as the notorious crime of the

whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general

self-liberation". (Marx's quotation, 140)

While Laclau is speaking in Marxist terms of a pre-revolutionary political climate, his label of the scapegoat class is applicable to the post-9/11 moment; the amorphous terrorist becomes the perpetrator of the "notorious crime's]" against society, and indeed becomes responsible for any internal flaw thereafter. Like

Mouffe, Laclau is supposing that an outsider class is a necessary component of self-identification, and it is at the instant that this separation is structured that citizenship becomes hegemonic. Hegemonic community is very much at the heart of statist politics, and manifests itself most conspicuously in what has been referred to as the "culture war" environment of post-9/11 America. More telling,

22 however, is the way in which the state's restructuring of community ascribes to the implied rules of morale culture and its corresponding myths.

The conversion of cultural capital into political clout is a standby of any

ideology and any wartime context, but at the epicentre of the culture war around terrorism and the War on Terror proper is also a dimension of neocolonialism that both alludes to standard American adventurist mythologies and extends these ideologies into a renewed Manifest Destiny. The hegemonic community that

Laclau refers to has as its foundation the witnessing of "notorious crimes," but because the terrorist as social criminal resists definition, Terror remains largely spectral. America must then seek out the evil that has caused its suffering, and with the moral and the sacred at its behest, it embarks on an imperialist crusade to democratize the global community. Political goals become conflated with moral ones in the language of the War on Terror; it is no accident, for instance, that George W. Bush overtly referred to the war as a crusade, and there are unmistakably evangelistic overtones to the directive of "Infinite Justice" over the

"Axis of Evil" for the purpose of "Iraqi Freedom." However, more troubling is the use of morality (a slippery concept at the best of times) to pave the way for U.S. military expansionism and conquest. America conceptualizes itself as a superhero State answering a higher calling, but its insistence upon the fulfillment of "God's work" is a hegemonic drive that "mainly [makes] itself felt by an arrogance based on its crushing technical superiority rather than on its elevated morality" (Virilio, Ground Zero 36). Here the true gains of ideology to the State war machine becomes clearer still; keep the war rolling on moral energy, and the

23 tougher questions need never be asked. There is, subsequently, no dissonance

over the disparity between the War on Terror as Moral Crusade and the collateral

damage costs that claim innocent lives.

As cultural artefacts of a post-9/11 America, the tribute materially traces the ideological machinery at work as the nation strives for appropriate self-

[re]definition and actively participates in the direction of this process. The

memorialization of the attacks as tragedy and call to arms is the tribute's primary raison d'etre, and exemplifies the thrust towards symbolic violence as a characteristic of both terrorism and the expected response to terror. The exchange of gestures echoes Jean Baudrillard's assertion that while "terrorism is always that of the real," the history that is invented, that crystallizes around an attack, is part of the "last great myth" (47). Memory, then, extends well beyond the recounting of events; in the case of the post-traumatic America that rose and is always rising in the long wake of September 11, memory functionally gives life to the trauma that it mourns. Memorialization is a selective process, and one that can be steered by self-interest to engineer its own terror, and while the rhetoric of war organizes itself around the conceptualization of democracy and iterates praiseful cliches regarding its pursuit of equality—the democracy of the dead, the everyday people's heroism, the liberation of Iraq—what the tribute does, in essence, is assist in the maintenance and expansion of the barriers the state outwardly claims to be deconstructing in its race for global democratization.

In examining the production of the tribute as cultural capital, my work will necessarily involve itself with the relationship between both sides of the symbolic

24 violence driving the moral energy that, in turn, carries the War on Terror forward

and expands its ideological imperialism outwards. The tribute is poised as a

"special" treatment of memorialization, but really is, in essence, defined more by

its timing and placement than by any intrinsic energies that separate it from its

propagandist elements. More simply, I am saying that tributes are a

manifestation of familiar propagandist aesthetics and principles: they are

produced as cultural artefacts that represent a quintessential moment in

American exceptionalism, an ongoing ideological enterprise for the state, but one

that is most widely and visibly pronounced in moments of contestation and the

"experimental surges" that Deleuze and Guattari suppose are always at the

borders of the state. Tributes, in all their many forms, commercial and official,

feed directly into the state's ideological machinery by serving in the

reterritorialization that accompanies a threat at the nation's margins, and even while they exploit the events of 9/11 for any number of self-motivated reasons

(e.g. financial gain, public relations points), they stream into the mythology of

innocence and exceptionalism that are to be the grounding for a reconstruction of

nationhood. Tribute demonstrates the equating of memory with the "common sense...[that] is the State consensus raised to the absolute" (Deleuze and

Guattari 376); moreover, tributes exist as a means of generating uncontestable support for State policy because of the "sacred cow" aura that they encapsulate.

It is this uncontestable nature that imparts so much power within tribute; no

longer is it "mere" propaganda, for its pedagogical aims are couched in something much deeper: respect. The power of this prescribed respect is in its

25 suppression of any presumptive opposition: in the face of this censorship, to cast

doubt on tribute and its cause—respect for the loss of innocent lives—is, as I

have already mentioned, absolutely unacceptable within the heightened emotive

climate of war.

Over the course of the following chapters of my dissertation, I expect to

provide enough historical commentary in order to outline the ascendancy of the morale culture and its relevance to the tribute (and wee versa); however, while much of the material dealing with propaganda and its corresponding wartime climate will (predictably) be drawn from sources pre-dating September 11,1 plan to apply this content in ways useful in examining the current conflict, the War on

Terror. It is important to mention this detail because what I am not trying to do is build up any sort of simplistic one-to-one equation between the War on Terror that followed the 9/11 attacks and the character of past conflicts; though there are clearly analogous elements that define a commonality in the many manifestations of war, I am also interested in following some of the articulations of warfare that are unique to the War on Terror and what it means or will mean to the culture promoting it. Such exploration will look at the current role of the tribute more expansively, not merely as a material expression of the post-9/11

Zeitgeist, but also as an integral piece of the ideological machinery labeled generally as state interest, and its self-perpetuation. The tribute, as the tactile intersection between memory, representation, and state politics, serves as a location for investigating how cultural capital originates and is consumed within the "wholly mythical economics" of a state at war, in which, like the condition of

26 Ornamental Cookery that Roland Barthes describes in Mythologies,

"consumption can perfectly well be accomplished by looking" (79). The

spectacularization of warfare means the substitution and simulation that allows a

War on Terror to exist and continue its onward march despite its doomed

abstract project of defining, then capturing, an indescribable enemy; such a war, with its material lack (lack of an enemy, lack of results, lack of decided victory), turns to the mythical capital of the tribute in order to draw the emotive vigour required for the continuation of the crusade against terror that promises a moral victory if not a practical one. The generation of the tribute's value in the cultural circuit of wartime and the broader implications of this semiotic production work to treat a set of themes in an "appropriate" manner, namely, in a fashion that is friendly to state interests at a moment its hegemonic order is most threatened.

Chapter Two begins at The End: if the tribute does one thing really well, it is the assignment of death to different categories; it determines for us what is significant (our casualties) and what is insignificant (collateral damage), and to a notable extent, informs our reaction to deaths and the memorialization of human loss. As such, death is rewritten in separate streams; in one, death exists elsewhere as an anonymous event that takes place outside the legitimate domain of a just war, or, in the case of the suicide bombers, whose deaths problematize the very logic of death typology in their conversion into the raw materials of terror. On the other hand, death becomes a unifying, democratizing force—the birth of a thanato-democracy. There is, as well, the selection and assignment of the dead into community, not a necropolis perse, but a

27 postmortem designation: Americans all. Death, it is emphasized, forms what is

in more ways than one the perfect democracy. The 9/11 slain take on the sort of

second life that Jules Michelet describes as ce devoir d /'historian, this work of

the historian (Anderson 198); Benedict Anderson, in speaking of the role that

Michelet and historians like him played in forming national communities, asserted that "[he] not only claimed to speak on the behalf of large numbers of anonymous

dead people, but insisted, with poignant authority, that he could say what they

'really' meant and 'really' wanted, since they themselves 'did not understand.'

From then on, the silence of the dead was no obstacle to the exhumation of their deepest desires" (Anderson 198). Far from being an impediment to deciphering thoughts and desires of the perished, death offers an opportunity to speak effectually for the dead, and what this ability has translated into within the post-

9/1 1 sphere is a conveniently model democracy whose randomness and finality absolves it of any divisions, real or perceived. In a system so "utterly democratic"

(Portraits ix), these memorialized dead extend to "that larger community of

Americans who mourns for all the World Trade Center victims, strangers to them or not, just as in an earlier day their parents mourned for the dead of Pearl

Harbor" (vii), to solidify "a focus for the expression of unfocused sorrow" (ix). The transparent comparison in the introduction to the New York Times's compilation

Portraits 9/11/01 between the public rallying that occurred around the Pearl

Harbor attacks and those of September 11 aptly outlines a parallel in both the message and the mentality of a country that sees itself /under attack and proceeds to march towards war. The insistence that the dead demand retribution

28 rests heavily on the assumption that they "live"; the afterlife that is imagined for the victims-turned-heroes of a pre-war attack congeals around a feeling of

innocence and, later, righteousness that permits, even demands, revenge. The

mediation of death as an entry into a "perfect" democracy is particularly intriguing and seems exemplary of what Michelet dubs the work of the historian, namely writing the second life on the behalf of the dead, and in doing so, saying authoritatively what they themselves [the deceased] did not understand, and at politically convenient moments. The production of immaculate community as the afterthought of death stimulates interrogation around the role of selective memory in the construction of death and its meanings, especially those applied productively to the formation of state bodies. The constant iteration of the

Democracy of Death (the phraseology I am lifting directly from Portraits of Grief, but the concept of a thanato-democracy is ubiquitous in the realm of tribute) points to a decidedly state-led mode of thinking about death, which is to say, a

"useful" way of reflecting on the loss of life: martyrdom. I find that while the 9/11 tribute shies away from including the word "martyr" (perhaps due to its jihad-\sh associations in the news?), there is no shortage of allusions to angels, heroes, saints, and similar iconography in describing the dead of 9/11. With only a little imagination, it becomes easy to see these dead as having laid down their lives willingly for our common-good cause. Hence, the second life that Michelet describes is attached to the larger ideological aims of the state in creating morale culture, which is conducive (maybe requisite) to carrying out the War on Terror. I do not hesitate to point out that the state always exerts certain techniques of

29 power as a means of perpetuating its dominance; such is the character and logic

of hegemony. However, the climate of war and the morale culture borne from it

represents a moment of heightened hegemonic control, specifically as a counter

to the ideological threats that become exposed outside or at state borders and,

more importantly, the fissures that occur between a state's self-definition and its

actions at war. What cannot exist in morale culture is dissonance, and

consequently the formation of morale culture inclines towards monolithic master

narratives that reterritorialize emergent resistances and curb "the 'danger'

inherent in any line that escapes, in any line of flight or creative

deterritorialization: the danger of veering toward destruction, toward abolition"

(Deleuze and Guattari 299). Within this statist enterprise, the cultural capital of the tribute becomes transparent; the task of creating official explanatory

narratives around the events and concepts related to the attacks and the omnipresent threat of Terror, such as death (a concept whose productive

reworkings both typify and define the morale culture) is what the construction of

American monomyth is really about. Monomyth, a construct first developed by

Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces to describe the archetypal story of the hero's journey, can be applied specifically to the conditions of nationalistic self-understanding in the United States; the American monomyth, whose unique brand of adventurism is derived from its heritage in the captivity narrative and the heroics of the "private gun," has its formulae laid out thusly by Robert Jewett and

John Shelton Lawrence in The Myth of the American Superhero:

30 A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal

institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to

renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his

decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the

superhero then recedes into obscurity. (6)

Jewett and Lawrence offer the proposition that the conditions of the superhero myth are not confined just to storytelling, but to the United States' interactions as a state; in the September 11 scenario, the monomyth and its contributions to the ideation of an exceptionalism are at the centre of monument building and memorialization as a general practice as they represent the site of a border war around what gets included in the communal rendering of American selfhood.

In helping to design American exceptionalism, 9/11 tributes pave the way for some exceptional things to happen: besides constructing a workable collective or community and providing productive redefinitions of democracy that allow social lines to be redrawn in directions conducive to the wartime business of rebuilding nationhood and extracting justice, tributes also serve a very purpose as a conduit for public frustration. Human emotion is, I would argue, a very real thing, and as an unknown quantity to the State, could be potentially damaging if not brought into some system of governance; while it is not reasonable to expect a cessation of feeling, it is possible—and actually advantageous—to channel emotion towards state-driven objectives. What makes tributes unique is their capacity for focusing collective emotive outflow on a tightly limited set of themes, which can be summarized thus: America must grieve, evildoers must be

31 punished and We (all Americans and those on the side of Good) must unite towards this cause, and God is on America's side. The "official attitude" that is the culmination of these themes is one that makes the distinction between Us and Them "clear and uncomplicated, untroubled by subtlety or nuance, let alone irony or skepticism" (Fussell 164); the instrumentation of the memorial to teach this gravitating idea and, in tandem, its modalities characterizes an overlap between history and didacticism that prompted Susan Sontag to suggest that collective memory is simply collective instruction renamed (85). Chapter Three examines how the educational purposes of commemoration are condensed in the only national September 11 memorial currently completed and open to the public, the Pentagon Memorial. The site, which opened September 2008, has been touted repeatedly by its designers as "a place like no other" is, in terms of its design and intentions, a place that is actually very much like any other that calls itself a memorial space, specifically in its investment towards establishing a univocal explication of events. The designers' statement captures this supposedly novel, experiential dynamic that the Pentagon Memorial is intended to encourage:

Inviting personal interpretation on the part of the visitor, the Memorial

provokes thought yet does not prescribe what to think or how to feel. Both

individual and collective in nature, the Memorial intends to record the

sheer magnitude of that tragic day by embedding layers of specificity that

begin to tell the story of those whose lives were taken. ("Pentagon

Memorial Designers' Statement")

32 Nevertheless, upon closer inspection the more hands-off, individuated dimensions of the memorial fall away to reveal an opportunistic adherence to familiar didactic forms: the Pentagon Memorial promises the visitor the experience of discovery, but what is discovered is in fact predetermined by the space itself and its fidelity to "the language of 'administering memory'" (Young

124) that the memorial's paratext works overtime to apply (Torres, note to the author 22 Jun 2009). I recognize this hypocritical practice of training personal discovery as the commonality linking the education provided to the public by the memorial space and that of education as a generalized disciplinary apparatus; teaching (and learning) is a part of the grander ideological machinery that Michel

Foucault describes as being organized around the creation, measurement, punishment, and absorption of a "useful delinquency" through disciplinary exercises that include education:

...discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up

confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering

about...in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. It

must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution

of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power

that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that

wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations,

coalitions—anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.

(Discipline and Punish 219)

33 Memorials serve the purpose of establishing the organizational "verticality" that

Foucault identifies as the panoptical arrangement that becomes requisite in any system in which a few dominate a great many; commemoration after September

11 constitutes a grouping along vertical lines by gathering everyone within a community limited by its focal memories, paradoxically uniting people into an obedient mass through a single commitment while simultaneously alienating them as individuals from one another and from themselves. What is particularly interesting, though, is how the Pentagon Memorial compacts these educational outcomes into the "interpretive" experience that it offers to the visitor; by implementing an outwardly laissez-faire approach to memorialization, the

Pentagon site has managed to skirt, at least temporarily, much of the fallout inherent to such a problematic contradiction.

As an incomplete memorial, the former World Trade Center, now Ground

Zero, exemplifies the stages that move the makeover of a disaster area into the transformation spectacle, the "second life" of a nonliving victim that becomes the focal point of public attention and remembrance. The multifarious discourse interested in the collapse of the Twin Towers and the planning and re-planning invested into restoring the buildings is infused with both organic and spiritual themes that elevate the change of the physical landscape into a transformation of the nation's very soul. There have been, of course, many renditions regarding the symbolic relevance of the Towers, and most of these come to some after-the- fact agreement that the Towers' inherent semiotic power led to their selection as targets for the attacks. However, while there has been much discussion

34 surrounding the former Towers and their symbolic significance prior to and

immediately following their collapse, relatively little dialogue has taken place in

regards to the continuance of this mythic meaning into the restoration effort. This discursive omission could be explained in any number of ways, but the very fact that it exists is nothing short of astonishing to me given the conspicuous nature of the references. The stories that collect around the former Twin Towers and

Ground Zero exemplify the myths that shape the life, death, and afterlife of nonliving, non-animated entities. Project Rebirth (www.projectrebirth.com), documents the rebuilding process "as New York prepares its monument to a new generation and pays homage to the previous one"; there is, again, the marked separation of life before and after the attacks into different generations, but also the agreeable symmetry that joins the symbolic value of the Towers pre-attack with their immortality. Whatever the WTC site meant before the attacks is irrelevant, lost with the assumed innocence of the bygone pre-9/11 generation; it is now the centre of a remembrance that makes sense of what comes after the attacks: the need for resilience, for the wartime directive of doing one's part, for unity against adversity, for revenge and the War on Terror that is the route to satisfying that need for vengeance. Buildings, too, become infused with the values of nationhood and become actors in the myth-building resistance against terror:

The collapse of the towers is the major symbolic event. Imagine they had

not collapsed: the effect would not have been the same at all. The

fragility of global power would not have been so strikingly proven. The

35 towers, which were the emblem of that power, still embody it in their

dramatic end, which resembles a suicide...

Were the Twin Towers destroyed, or did they collapse? Let us be

clear about this: the two towers are both a physical, architectural object

and a symbolic object (symbolic of financial power and global economic

liberalism). The architectural object was destroyed, but it was the

symbolic object which was targeted and which it intended to demolish.

One might think the physical destruction brought about the symbolic

collapse. But in fact no one, not even the terrorists, had reckoned on the

total destruction of the towers. It was, in fact, their symbolic collapse that

brought about their physical collapse, not the other way around.

(Baudrillard. Spirit 46-48)

The memorial effort around the resurrection at Ground Zero reveals that the WTC

has, indeed, a life story to be told for it, and a lengthy afterlife narrative as well.

The lost non-living join Michelet's dead in the reanimation project that is posthumous "beyond-the-grave" storytelling expressed on behalf of the silent.

The race to rebuild on Ground Zero is a practical place to start examining the meanings tied up with the WTC's new life and corresponding afterlife, with the recovery efforts on Ground Zero signifying a death passage and subsequent memorialization marking a transition into immortality. The Times's Portraits includes photos of the building's wreckage amongst its "utterly democratic" collection of obituaries; the chiaroscurist assemblages depict Ground Zero as being a holy place, with conspicuous suggestions of Christian meaning included

36 (e.g. crosses, "divine" light, as in the pictures presented on pages 378 and 410 of

Portraits) and the falling of the towers as catalyst in the unity of Americans via the

Democracy of Death and the moral(e) crusade that followed closely after. In the meantime, the Tribute in Light, a WTC memorial launched March 11-April 13,

2003 and to observe the September 11 anniversary thereafter (2003-2005, and

20082), stands as a temporary memorial to fill up the void in space and thought between the collapse of the Twin Towers and the appearance of their successors; the twin beams of light, which rise from Ground Zero and fill up the spaces on the skyline once taken up by the buildings, ghost the presence of the towers and while suggesting their continuance also see their transcendence into iconography:

We set out to "repair" and "rebuild" the skyline—but not in a way that

would attempt to undo or disguise the damage. Those buildings are gone

now, and they will never be rebuilt. Instead we would create a link

between ourselves and what was lost. In so doing, we believed, we could

also repair, in part, our city's identity and ourselves.

All the same we saw the work as part of the physical and spiritual

reconstruction efforts... The reconstruction of the skyline did not have to

be literal. Besides, we wanted our proposal to be a realistic, viable project,

not a fantastical one. We felt an incredible urgency. We wanted the light to

inspire the rescue workers and the city at large and to show the world that

2 2008 would be the last time that the Tribute in Light memorial would appear, due to budgetary restrictions; as of September 11, 2008 a petition has been running to save it (http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/tributeinliqht). The petition's goal is one million signatures; as of June 16, 2009, it had 267. 37 New York was still New York. (Bonevardi, "Tribute in Light' Explained"

Besides the significance of the symbolic collapse that Baudrillard describes, there is also to be considered the symbolic rebuilding that Bonevardi and his colleagues gesture towards in their tribute and which extended into the generation of ideas for work on Ground Zero in the more practical sense. The construction on Ground Zero has been a delicate subject for the reasons I have outlined thus far; the ideation of Ground Zero as sacred ground makes it imperative that any building project includes the new ideological import of the space into account. Hence, the architectural contest to build on Ground Zero culminated in the re-designation of Ground Zero as the Memory Foundations, that is, the future foundations for the construction of the Freedom Tower and its cohorts, with the telling allusion to the use of collective memory as a grounding element for the new buildings. The rebuilding plan has been changed several times, at least in part because of public dissatisfaction with the initial winning entry (complaints abound, but common to them all is the demand for a "fitting" memorial on the space, which the supposedly "sterile" Libeskind/Childs design apparently failed to address satisfactorily); it remains at the time of this writing an unanswered question how the rebuilding process will unfold, but the continual controversy over matters not of safety nor architectural pragmatism but of the gesture made by the new building seems to underscore my own assumptions about the importance of representation and symbolic resonance in the necessary industry of restoration post-attacks. Again, it is the issue of talking and back-

38 talking over the issue of tribute, in this case a building-as-tribute memorial, that makes the WTC an irresistible focal point for my work on tribute production.

The dead of Flight 93, whose aircraft crashed in a Shanksville,

Pennsylvania field after a mythologized "battle in the sky," likewise populate the suggestive storytelling that is the common denominator to all 9/11 commemorative spaces; however, because the facts of the events that took place on Flight 93 are very scant, heroic myth has at its disposal a special latitude. With little recorded, verifiable information, no survivors, and no direct witnesses to the flight's demise in a rural field, it stands that no one really knows or likely will ever know what happened on board the flight; the telling of the doomed flight's story is Michelet's "second-life" thesis played to its extremity, a situation that affords The Flight That Fought Back its obvious tribute appeal.

Chapter Five explores the ways in which telling the story of Flight 93 and its dead has been facilitated by the information vacuum that situates it; it also parallels the preferred version of Flight 93's history as fight story, more specifically of the variety that Richard Slotkin describes in Gunfighter Nation as typifying "the mystique of privileged violence" (55) that characterizes the version of the Frontier

Myth he understands and unpacks as a uniquely American brand of heroism:

What is distinctively "American" is not necessarily the amount or kind of

violence that characterizes our history but the mythic significance we have

assigned to the kinds of violence we have actually experienced, the forms

of symbolic violence we imagine or invent, and the political uses to which

we put that symbolism.

39 When history is translated into myth, the complexities of social and

historical experiences are simplified and compressed into the action of

representative individuals or "heroes." The narrative of the hero's action

exemplifies and tests the political and/or moral validity of a particular

approach to the use of human powers in the material world. The hero's

inner life—his or her code of values, moral or psychic ambivalence,

mixtures of motive—reduces to personal motive the complex and

contradictory mixture of ideological imperatives that shape a society's

response to a crucial event. But complexity and contradiction are focused

rather than merely elided in the symbolizing process. The heroes of myth

embody something like the full range of ideological contradictions around

which the life of the culture revolves, and their adventures suggest the

range of possible resolutions that the culture's lore provides. (14)

Slotkin appears primarily interested in Theodore Roosevelt's Frontier Thesis in

The Winning of the West (1885-1894) over Frederick Turner's articulation of this myth in the 1893 address "The Significance of the Frontier in American History": while the latter is duly famous for his interrogation of the westward development of the nation as the defining experience of "perennial rebirth, this fluidity of

American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, [that] furnish the forces dominating

American character" (Turner n.p.), Slotkin argues that Roosevelt's observations about American exceptionalities being rooted in the belief in regenerative violence and "visions of managerial hegemony" (59) make his findings more

40 appropriate for analyzing the role of Frontier mythology in the culture, moral values, and politics of post-Frontier America. Roosevelt, who was the 26th

President of the United States, was also a renowned writer, historian, and outdoor sportsman; the original "cowboy president," the writer of this iteration of the Frontier Thesis combined his love of hunting with his interest in policy, and

Slotkin describes his work as "symbolizing] history as a series of great 'hunts' in which a succession of representative hunter-heroes and political leaders carry the nation from colony to world power.... And from the prominence given to

Roosevelt's own exploits, it is clear that he himself is eligible to cap both the game-killing and the political sequences" (42). In keeping with the Rooseveltian articulation of the Frontier myth, the heroic narrative that is the uncomplicated history of Flight 93 subscribes to the motivated storytelling that Slotkin describes and for the reasons he puts forth. The events onboard Flight 93 are arguably make up the most mystified of the histories corresponding to the four doomed planes and their targets, and it is this conspicuous lack of factual detail that represents an opportunity to render its fight story simulacrum purely and without resistance.

The tribute also applies in marked ways to the creation and sale of the

American Hero post-9/11; specifically, the shift towards celebrating heroism of the everyday variety necessitates changes in the way that heroic and demonic actions are defined and the method by which these actions, in turn, define actors in the War on Terror. The elevation of the working people to the position of

American martyrdom is contingent upon a few things occurring; first, the Other of

41 the wartime equation is dealt with in a fashion that permits its dehumanization,

which is an imperative factor of the myth of American exceptionalism, and

second, the modification of the meaning of heroism which reflects the tendency

that Fussell describes in his examination of war culture: the morphing of

definitions into "virtual treatise[s]" needed for the sustenance of artificially high

morale. My own excursion into the topic of heroism (and by extension its counterpoint of extreme villainy) redefined will concentrate primarily on the

morale balloon that was Private Jessica Lynch. Lynch's situation stands out as a working example of heroism post-September 11 and the image strategy at work in the unreality of war; just as Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) argues in Wag the

Dog (1997) that war is a drama in which Act Two is about the hero and that, consequently, "You can't have a war and not have a hero," the War on Terror has seen the development of home-grown heroes who signify the simultaneous extraordinariness and commonality of the American national character. The celebrated nature of heroism says something, too, about the ideological direction

(and redirection) of war; whereas in past wars America has touted raw strength and moral vengeance only, the War on Terror emphasizes the pursuit of these values in defence of something less aggressively demonstrative: innocence.

Chapter Six will elaborate upon my work on Private Jessica Lynch's accounts of her travails in Iraq to look more deeply into the role of personal memoirs in the creation of the master narratives of the War on Terror. The retrospective is the intersection of personal storytelling with the project of nationalist mythology;

Lynch's story, in many respects, is the prototypical 9/11 hero story, one whose

42 currency and eventual dissolution in the public domain helps to lay bare some of the myths that work to shape American self-understanding (specifically, a

productive version of this understanding—a morale culture version) and some of the state's ideological machinery responsible for the formation and dissemination of these useful myths. Barthes's argument, that "myth is speech stolen and restored...when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place. It is this brief act of larceny, this moment taken for a surreptitious faking, which gives mythical speech its benumbed look" (125, Barthes's italics), seems incomplete without a post-9/11-appropriate footnote: myth can also be memory stolen and restored. The heroic narrative based supposedly on Lynch's experiences as a soldier behind enemy lines became as mythically successful as it was because there was apparently no reliable memory or version of events; with Lynch's own global amnesia creating an information vacuum regarding the events and chronology of her ordeal, the space left to tell her story for her (once again,

Michelet's words spring to mind) offered a prime opportunity for the variety of mediated hero worship that sees the transformation of a personal narrative become the official State rationale for exceptionalism. Moreover, the wish- fulfillment that drives the wartime memorial in a manner that exposes its fabulist patriotic content also reveals the condition of official storytelling in a morale culture: when it comes to Our accounts of ourselves and our experiences, "only ideal imagery is allowed to enter" (Fussell 128). There is again the insistence upon the opposition of extremes that defines the nature of the Us/Them binary in wartime; memorialization or its absence sketches out the line of ideology that

43 separates these two sides. Memory is about the simulation of order, one that

never existed but is, at the appropriate political moments, "lost." Memorialization asserts the correctness of a certain unified version of events, and in doing so, propels a model for state control under the guise of reason. It doesn't even matter if the memories being used are themselves "real" or substituted, as

Lynch's story illustrates; what ultimately matters is applying the authenticating, human touch of personal memory towards creating a monomyth that takes its place as part of our crusade against terror. The War on Terror is decidedly chasing retribution for the loss of an innocence that America, as a wartime state, imagines for itself, largely after the fact, but perhaps more convincingly, and

Jessica Lynch became the natural choice for the variety of mediated hero worship that sold the war on a humanitarian level. Lynch, as the personification of American innocence, represented the shift in heroic storytelling; the story of private Lynch is itself an exercise in strategic mythologies, for she is, in her own words, "a way to symbolize all this stuff" ("Jessica Lynch Criticizes U.S.

Accounts"). The stuff of American wish-fulfillment is the stuff of wartime morale culture, the "goody-goody version as a plausible registration of actuality" (Fussell

166) that the public greedily consumes in order to exorcise the guilt, doubt, and dissonance that are the expected but unmentionable by-products of wartime thought. Of interest also is the perfect fit that eventuated between Lynch's global amnesia and the perfect memory that was constructed for her, an illustrative case for the advantages of speaking for the silent, the dead and the amnesiac, whom

Michelet dubs the receptacle of the historians' second life. The second life of the

44 hero in America reflects the intensification of myth in speaking over an unfavourable war effort and the place of the memorial story within the larger master narrative of America's moral crusade and its dispensing of democracy; the investment in plumping up the monomyth of American innocence accompanies the lack of results in the War on Terror. The ornamentation of myth is a welcome replacement for the awaited but unaccomplished victory, and war, like other manifestations of the work of "wholly mythical economics," is about the ocular, a "consumption [that] can be perfectly well accomplished simply by looking" (Barthes 79). And in wartime, looking, Baudrillard reasons, becomes a means of wrangling public belief and, by extension, public complacency:

Fake war, deceptive war, not even the illusion but the disillusion of war,

linked not only to defensive calculation, which translates into the

monstrous prophylaxis of this military machine, but also to the mental

disillusion of the combatants themselves, and to the global disillusion of

everyone else by means of information... Information has a profound

function of deception. It matters little what it "informs" us about, its

"coverage" of events matters little since it is precisely no more than a

cover: its purpose is to produce consensus by flat encephalogram. The

complement of the unconditional simulacrum in the field is to train

everyone in the unconditional reception of broadcast simulacra. Abolish

any intelligence of the event. The result is a suffocating atmosphere of

deception and stupidity. And if people are vaguely aware of being caught

up in this appeasement and this disillusion by images, they swallow the

45 deception and remain fascinated by the evidence of the montage of this

war with which we are inoculated everywhere: through the eyes, the

senses and in discourse. (68)

So seeing is indeed believing, and in a war that continues its empty-handed chase for a success or an exit strategy fuelled exclusively on moral energy, the use of information in order to distract far outweighs its intelligence-value; what the engineering of Lynch's story exemplifies is the creative use of information and the "authentic" memorial story to narrate the nation's ego-ideal at the very moment that its self-concept is under the heaviest fire, and "the map provides a more appealing, more plausible landscape when a familiar world spins out of control" (Der Derian 80).

With the memorial object as my springboard into discussing the solidarity of wartime's morale culture in general, I seek to dissect the connections between what a tribute really is and what it really does for the construction of a uniform mode of thinking in a moment of political conflict. What morale culture encapsulates is, in essence, a hyper-produced version of normal hegemonic concerns, and it is for this reason that the exploration of an extreme instance— that of war—can help one to glean some understanding of the State's machinery and its work towards its fullest hegemonic expression against the war machine's escape, one that is reachable only through the circuit of total war and results in a

"peace more terrifying still" (Deleuze and Guattari 421). Perhaps the more mysterious paradox in the troubled relationship between the self that is State and it terrorist Other is the manner in which power is shifted at increasing energies

46 between asymmetric sides; such is the strangeness of the weaponry of

simulation and meaning, that it has driven politics to this place:

The war machine has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the

States are now no more than objects or means adapted to that machine.

This is the point at which Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed; to

be entitled to say that politics is the continuation of war by other means, it

is not enough to invert the order of the words as if they could be spoken in

either direction; it is necessary to follow the real movement at the

conclusion of which the States, having appropriated a war machine, and

having adapted it to their aims, reimpart a war machine that takes charge

of the aim, appropriates the States, and assumes wider political functions.

(Deleuze and Guattari 421)

Or maybe Ben Stein names the problem more succinctly in his rereading of

Clausewitz: "Politics is a continuation of show business by other means" (Stein in Der Derian 153), that is, the politics of both the State and the terror that it is constructed in opposition to share common moorings in the application of image and simulation, as well as the drama that these tools impart. The tribute is the

State's arsenal, but its operations tie in inextricably with the terror it represents; simply put, the 9/11 tribute exists strictly as a response to those acts of terror.

The September 11 tribute, for all its anti-Other logic, answers the symbolic violence of terrorism with its own simulated terror; morality, patriotism, innocence—all the mythic machinery that springs into action via the tribute is the

State's allergic reaction to the resistance at its margins, the cost of its insatiable

47 colonizing drives. In his renowned essay "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell offers his thesis that in domination the tyrant kills his own freedom, and we see the same ironic difficulties in the state, which despite its superior firepower and alliances remains a hostage to a terror that it cannot control, predict, or name.

48 Chapter Two

Second Lives: Portraits 9/11/01 and the Democracy of Death

It was at a recent show during his Weapons of Self Destruction Tour that

Robin Williams delivered his rant regarding unauthorized photography and more specifically his being the subject of such recordings. His anecdote about an audience member snapping pictures of him on her cellphone comes to a somewhat predictable end, but the brief exchange he had with her, when taken just a little beyond its immediate narrative boundaries, becomes an apt departure point for discussing how we make memories for ourselves individually and then, in some cases, transmit them to others with the assistance of the recorded image.

The story that Williams built around the incident was simultaneously a complaint, a warning, and a general observation about the relationship between the ubiquity of recording devices and the pluralized ownership of memory, with the latter being the bone of contention for him as an entertainer. When Williams spotted the woman photographing him, he asked immediately that she erase the photo and refrain from taking any more pictures during the show. Faced with this request, she countered him with a complaint of her own: how would she remember? The photo, she argued, was essential for her to have any recollection of his performance. This last point would be the trigger for Williams's punchline, which was that she would have to remember him the "old-fashioned way—with [her] brain."

49 Williams's humorously succinct advice to the audience member

underscores only one facet of the role that recording technologies play in

producing memory, likely the most obvious one, which is the tendency for young people to replace their working memories and creative brainpower with Facebook albums. However, the young woman's statement, if taken as more than the conclusion of an intergenerational joke, raises other more provocative questions about the project of creating memories, both at the individual and social levels, through the recorded image and the accompanying issues around ownership that ultimately factor into how images are worked into memories. When we take photographs, we are in part, as the woman in Williams' story describes, doing so to remind ourselves about the details of an event, but there is also the involvement of the photo in sharing an event; the photo becomes documentary evidence that we then use to convince others to accept a particular interpretation of an incident—not just that an event happened, but that it happened in a certain way. In the latter task, the photo can bridge memory and interpretation, such that, as Susan Sontag suggests, the production of collective memory is simply collective instruction:

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What

is called collective memory is not remembering but stipulating: that this is

important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures

that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives

of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of

significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. (86)

50 When recorded images are filtered into commemorative spaces and the writing of

public memory, several questions about the intersections between history,

narrative, memory, and ideology—as realized in memorial photography—become

apparent.

The focus of this chapter is a work of memorial photography that

commemorates the dead of 9/11: the New York Times compilation of its

"Portraits of Grief series [Sept. 15-Dec. 31/01] entitled Portraits 9/11/01, which

illustrates the interplay between the photographic image—namely, the portrait

[more on this point to follow]—and the construction of the history of September

11. Factoring into this commemorative production was the immediate problem of rebuilding national myths that the attacks had rendered unreliable and therefore threatened; the memory proffered by the tribute, Portraits included, is an antidote to the dissonance and uncertainty faced by a destabilized nation. In the

Portraits project, the representation of individual histories pre-September 11 is juxtaposed against the portraiture of the rawer collective post-9/11 experience in a way that invites an agreement-fostering nostalgia. The dominant note of civic memorialization after 9/11 is that of a return to the better past, with its innocence and clear delineations; the timing of nostalgic sentiments, consequently, positions them "to thrive when current realities are less than ideal" (Vance 8).

The emotional needs that follow the dissolution of a perceived exceptionality include the insistence on examining and representing losses in a manner that works towards the restoration of the pre-existing order, so that,

51 [dissatisfied with the present, we may recall an earlier age and transform

that into something of a golden age. This is not done on the basis of

historical facts...but on inferences made from a series of opposites. If

society appears to be drifting aimlessly, there must have been a time

when life had direction and meaning; if human existence appears

confusing and senseless, there must have been a time when it was clear

and purposeful. In short, if things are bad now, there must have been a

time when they were good. In this way, nostalgia is entirely non-specific.

(Vance 8)

The uniformity of nostalgia and its assertion of a "correct" [i.e. patriotic, nation- building] version of events is informed by its "reterritorializing function"; when

Deleuze and Guattari elaborate upon this directive in A Thousand Plateaus by saying that "there is no history but of the majority, or of minorities as defined in relation to the majority" (292), they are referring to the majority that can be formed out of the consensus of nostalgia, a consensus founded upon the welcome familiarity that attends our comfort with the experience in other contexts

(Vance, note to the author). Portraits, which orbits around the concept of the

"democracy of death," exhibits precisely this tendency towards a conceptualization of an ideal past in opposition to an uncertain present and, more important, the incorporation of the photograph in informing a myth-driven reading of the memorial. Towards these ends, Portraits is invested in framing its visual content as a conversation between the past and present—and the living and the

52 dead—and, through the comparison that it invites, in extracting a means of reclaiming a previous and more stable order.

That Portraits is packaged to appear reminiscent of a tombstone seems immediately to set the tone for its memorial focus, which is the commemoration of a community of dead. Beyond the physical weight of the hardcover text's 550 pages and the sombreness of its cover, the printed necropolis has as its defining thematic feature the "democracy of death," that is, death not simply as the common leveller but as a condition of membership. In the foreword to Portraits,

Howell Raines, the executive editor of the New York Times at the time of the text's publication, explains the connection between death and citizenship that would become the organizing principle of the text:

"Portraits of Grief reminds us of the democracy of death, an event that

lies in the future of every person on the planet. The scary force of that

universal fact sometimes inspires in the most sober soul an impulse to flee

into a carpe diem mood of headlong hedonism. I think, however, that the

1,910 stories reported in our paper and collected here in Portraits 9/11/01

stir an entirely different feeling. When I read them, I am filled with the

awareness of the subtle nobility of everyday existence, of the ordered

beauty of quotidian life for millions of Americans, of the unforced

dedication with which our fellow citizens go about their duties as parents,

life partners, employers or employees, as planters of community gardens,

coaches of the young, joyful explorers of this great land and the world

beyond its shores. These lives, bundled together so randomly into a union

53 of loving memory by those terrible cataclysms of September 11, remind us

of what Walt Whitman knew: "The United States themselves are

essentially the greatest poem." (vii)

What Raines's observations on the democracy of death and, later, the organized obituaries that make up the content of the book make clear is the working definition of American citizenry and citizenship that is being elaborated on by the portraits—their selection, their arrangement, their interpretation—and that joins

Portraits to the larger mythic standards and narratives that characterize commemorative objects and spaces. The positioning of the text as a record or

"roll call" of the victims necessitates a boundary between included and excluded individuals, with the implied division falling between an imagined community

(Benedict Anderson's term) of Americans and the outsider terrorist imaginary that it is garrisoned against.3 By definition, community implies antagonism and, as

Chantal Mouffe asserts in Return to the Political, while this tension can be realized in productive ways (as in the case of the Utopian pluralistic democracy model that she envisions), it more frequently leads to strife and division:

Politics, as the attempt to domesticate the political, to keep at bay the

forces of destruction and to establish order, always has to do with conflicts

and antagonisms. It requires an understanding that every consensus is,

3 This preferred, simplified partition into in-group and out-group has complications built into it, as the controversy over "democratic" name placement in the World Trade Center memorial has made obvious: the plan to list names of the dead "randomly" (without affiliations or titles attached and in no alphabetical or ordinal placement) was instantly denounced as disrespectful by members of the NYFD and some victims' families (with the organization Take Back the Memorial leading the charge). Later plans were revised to include special groupings that reflected the affiliations of uniformed rescue workers; these, however, were still considered unsatisfactory by many still "seeking the inclusion of more details alongside the names than the foundation plan allows, including ages, where people worked and the ranks for uniformed workers" (Hakim n.p.). 54 by necessity, based on acts of exclusion and that there can never be a

fully inclusive "rational" consensus.

...It means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and has

to show traces of the exclusion which governs its constitution, what we

can call its "constitutive outside" [a term Mouffe borrows here from Derrida

to describe the exercise of definition through exclusion]. As a

consequence, all systems of social relations imply to a certain extent

relations of power, since the construction of a social identity is an act of

power. (141)

When Mouffe postulates that democracy—more specifically, what she refers to at different points in Return as modern democracy and its tongue-tangling accompaniment Radical-Liberal-Democratic Political Philosophy—can reconcile the tensions between those within the margins of a community and those that remain outside the borders to harmonize into a pluralistic arrangement, she is certainly not describing the kind of democracy being mobilized by Portraits as a

"community" text. Instead, upon engaging with the work, we are immediately shown the "right" side of the debate and the "correct" method of confronting the material (which is with grief, as the full title of the original series makes transparent). Unity is not a choice but an imperative; this much is obvious for both the victims and the readers alike. Remembrance becomes the indicator of one's relationship to the community, the democracy of death. Those who died on

Our side are described in and by the book as fallen heroes, and the reverence that their commemoration demands through tribute assures that the audience

55 comes to the text ready to be placed in the community into which the democracy of death extends; that is, the familiar obligation for respectful remembrance ("Lest

We Forget") invents a morally energized sense of belonging, one that comes to mobilize all members to serve the greater good through the restoration of the greatness we suppose existed before the "loss of innocence" brought about by the events of September 11 and vengeance against the wickedness of the terrorist Other.

In the context of post-9/11 America and, specifically, the global war on terror, the use of the democracy of death to generate, unify, and then mobilize a national community exemplifies the frequent interchangeability of memorialization and coercion. The framing in Portraits of the 1910 obituaries featured in the original series (the second edition, published in August 2003, would be expanded to include 2310 victim profiles; all profits from both editions were donated to the

New York Times Neediest Cases Fund) is formulated to elicit an anticipated emotional reaction: grief. However, while grief is individually experienced as a grouping of multiple, sometimes conflicting emotions, the memorial again, in the interest of engineering a productive unity, works to conflate these into the single monomythic package of national grief. With the deaths represented as being at once a mass murder and spontaneous democracy, and remembrance parcelled with the obligation to redress a loss of innocence and exceptionality, any paradoxes or outright contradictions that arise in considering these concepts together become negligible in the bigger moral picture that is always being constructed by the tribute and then dangled before the viewer. The record-

56 keeping that takes place in Portraits as it lays out its photographs and accompanying anecdotes has everything to do with contriving a bond beyond the reader and each lost life that is mentioned according to what Linenthal calls an

"architecture of suggestion"; when applying Linenthal's notion of prescribed meanings to the properties of a printed memorial instead of a more literal example of architecture, the cardinal rule remains "[to offer] not only aesthetic but moral direction" (Preserving Memory 170). Returning to the collection of obituaries and charged photography that makes up most of Portraits, we can see how national grief can be a powerful moral requirement, and how the appeal to emotion can help massage individual understandings of grief and loss back into more organized, directed (read "official") moral purposes. In the Portraits introduction, Janny Scott, a New York Times reporter, describes the process of selecting and compiling the stories included in the text: "What we wanted were stories, anecdotes, tiny but telling details that seemed to reveal something true and essential about how each person lived" (ix). For the lives that were, as

Times executive editor Raines put it, "bundled together so randomly," there had to be some reinstatement of humanizing individuality, but not just for the sake of giving the dead their respective identities back; the ideological capital of the anecdotal minutiae included rests in their effect on the reader and their ability to conform remembrance as it is enacted in the community of "memory vessels."

Nancy Miller equates the brevity of the statements about the deceased with the aesthetic of the portrait, where the "visual trumps the verbal, almost as though the 'newspaper of record' found itself at a loss for words, words seemingly

57 inadequate to the task of representing what makes an individual life a life, unable

to convey its emotional truth" (115); in the context of Portraits and the great

"emotional truth" that it seeks to reveal, namely, the precept of national unity in

the interest of some greater democratic vision, the anecdote works to scale down the aims of the common good to a more concrete language:

In the face of collective disaster, whose scale strained the imagination, the

anecdote was seized upon as a form suited to rendering the familiar acts

of ordinary life. Like the snapshot, the anecdote, through the brevity of its

narrative, catches life in its everyday dimensions. (115)

The emotional appeal of the anecdote is thus an effective point of entry into articulating an "unspeakable" disaster to the audience and rescuing the event from the indifference of abstraction; further, through the accessible public vocabulary of personalized tragedy and its calculated heartbreaking effects,

Portraits as tribute presents the materials for organizing a civic memory made irrefutable by a shared after-the-fact "emotional truth" that trumps all others. It is precisely this process of creating homogenized interpretation in which the text as a collection of materials is invested; they are to be viewed in toto, each as a contributing fragment of the monomythic whole.

The purposeful contradiction between community and individuality finds outward expression in Portraits through the arrangement of the photographs themselves. The most glaring visual separation occurs between colour photography and black-and-white photography, with the entire content falling between the covers appearing in black-and-white and the lone colour photograph

58 framed by the back cover of the text. The single colour photo, which is located on the text's prime real estate on the outer (back) cover, features a young child covering his face with both his hands, and beside him is a plaque with a portrait of his smiling late father set directly in front of an elaborate bow (perhaps a funeral arrangement or gift). The composition is vividly colourful with vibrant but not necessarily complimentary shades, possibly to retain or manufacture the appearance of randomness or candid verity. Nevertheless, the seemingly untouched, random palette of colour belies another, less immediate comparison that the photo calls up, which is that between the grieving child we witness in the

Portraits back cover picture and the grieving child whom we encounter in so many other places with the same conditioned sympathy. Additionally, there is also the rather stunning compositional similarity of the photo to one specific, emblematic image where a child's grief stood in as a representation of a nation in mourning: the photo of a three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's casket. Characterized by these and other possible layers of meaning and comparison, the photograph of the mourning child is established as a conduit for unifying individual experiences of loss into the greater narrative of national grief.

Further reinforcing this moral focus is the Raines quote, which appears again on this cover and proclaims the centrality of "a loving union of memory" that the reader, just by coming across these words on this page—alongside that picture— is brought into.

The overriding vision of national unity is carried further by the 109 photographs that appear interspersed within the pages of Portraits and among

59 the pictures of the deceased; it is from this set of documentary snapshots that the

photograph of the grieving child, which appears in colour on the back cover of the

text, is also taken. The aggregate function of these pictures, which are all black

and white and larger than the single photographs accompanying the profiles of the individual victims, can be read as similar to that of a chorus in the text; like the choruses of traditional Greek drama, the "group photos" guide the reader through the tragic acts of the book towards an expected catharsis. Although as a contemporary memorial text, Portraits can seem an unlikely setting in which to find a staple of ancient Greek theatre, the inclusion of a reference to this tradition

is hardly out of place when one considers a basic definition of the composition and function of the chorus:

The Greek chorus continued to play an important role in classical Greek

drama, especially in tragedy. Ranging in number from 50 in the time of

Thespis to 15 in later classical Greek drama, the chorus consisted of

Athenian citizens and were not professional actors. They function,

scholars have suggested variously, to offer a sense of rich spectacle to the

drama; to provide time for scene changes and give the principle actors a

break; to offer important background and summary information that

facilitates an audience's ability to follow the live performance; to offer

commentary about and underline main themes animating the action; and

to model an ideal audience's response to the unfolding drama. Nietzsche

suggests that it was the rhythmic dance and chants of the chorus,

positioned always to mediate the physical space separating audience and

60 actor, that evoked the visionary experience that was the very essence of

tragedy. ("The Classical Greek Chorus," my italics)

It is reasonable to argue here, I think, that the content of the group photographs in Portraits achieves the Classical dramatic chorus's tasks, or some useful variation thereof. They provide the situations against which the profiles are to be comprehended and consequently supply the proper emotional and thematic context for the commemorative object as a whole. Furthermore, the use of an implied chorus fits neatly into the democratic ambitions of the text; throughout the book, group photos capture the moments common to those left behind (including the readers) to witness the wake of the disaster: searches for the missing, memorial services, cleanup and reconstruction. The depiction of these emotional experiences is meant to reflect—and perhaps also substitute for—the "single chord of horror" that was communally felt and which gathered people into the same community of grief; Edward Linenthal, observing the democracy of death that followed the Oklahoma City bombing April 19, 1995, notes that the proximity that people feel to one another, to the victims, and to the disaster itself is actively altered by the images that they are guided through by the mass media:

Through the media, part of the inner life...became available to the public.

The fascination with the spectacle of the bombing, the drama and pathos

of following people's lives and their suffering, the vicarious drama and

horror of the stories and images, threatened, attracted, and moved people

to imagine themselves as part of an extended bereaved community...the

61 intense public outpouring of memorial expression was the means of

engagement for the wider imagined bereaved community...

Perhaps one of the greatest attractions of a nationwide bereaved

community is that it is one of the only ways Americans can imagine

themselves as one; being "together" with millions of others through

expressions of mourning bypasses or transcends the many ways in which

people are divided—by religion, by ideology, by class, by region, by race,

by gender. (Unfinished Bombing 111)

The immediacy of the pictures and the moments that they contain allow the viewer to partake of the events, albeit vicariously; like the chorus, the photos are positioned as the point of connection and instruction between the members of the

"ideal audience," spectators of the drama that would be September 11 and its aftermath.

Predictably, the group chorus-photos of Portraits, despite their ubiquity, are thematically confined to a tight, specific set of memorial concerns. The first theme common to the majority of the photographs is loss, which is illustrated repeatedly through the melodramatic tableaux of people putting up or examining missing photos, attending funeral services, visiting shrines, or "privately" (as privately as one can in front of a photographer, that is) contemplating the recent death of loved ones. However, while the odd picture of individual reflection finds its way into the set (such as the picture on page 40 of Marino Calderon's hand holding a picture of his missing wife), loss is typically depicted in the documentary group photographs as a massive, shared experience, with people

62 gathering together in the public expression of grief. Most of these gatherings, it

is made clear to the reader, are organized in spaces of some memorial import,

such as work places (186), halls of honor and remembrance (70), and religious

buildings (196). The congregations featured on pages 70 and 105 represent

perhaps the most publicly accessible of funereal group gatherings: with hands

clasped over their chests, the diverse members of this collective assume the same pose and, I would assume based on these pictures and their descriptions,

utter the same phrases: "students, officials and faculty members at City College

in upper Manhattan sing the national anthem in the Lewisohn Plaza of Honor during a memorial service for those who died on Septemeber 11" (105). Some pictures, on the other hand, offer glimpses into private memorial services; in these cases, the reader is invited to assume an almost voyeuristic vantage point.

On page 239, the photograph of the funeral held for Terrance Andre Aiken aptly illustrates this "funeral crasher" point of view: while the family mourns in the background, with Tru Trimingham holding the three-year-old son of his late brother-in-law in his arms, the foreground of the shot is made up of blurred flower arrangements and framed photographs; the picture of the mourning family is seen clearly through this foreground, which situates the viewer outside this moment to the point where one feels, while looking into this family moment, a surreptitiousness, as if to avoid some suggested imposition. Against the acknowledgement that the families featured in Portraits invited the Times into these intimate portraits of loss, the whole arrangement only appears that much more bizarre as readers are invited to "peep" into someone else's personal life as

63 witnesses to a grief from which they are, by definition, emotionally distanced;

similarly, the pictures of the public memorial gatherings—almost all of which took

place in New York City after the attacks—encourage a late vicarious participation on the part of the viewers. Time and distance (both geographic and emotional)

present no obstacle to readers, the photos say; simply by inspecting Portraits , they are welcome to share a generalized sense of loss that transcends these separations. These gestures, congealed in the documentary group pictures, all act to render the boundaries between public and private grief porous; the derivable conclusion that any difference between the two is artificial and that there are no private instances of grief that the readers can be kept out of effectively extends the reach of the democracy of death, whose invitation for membership the reader is (barring the "unacceptable" choice of an existential protest) unable to refuse.

Alongside the issuance of community membership, the documentary photos also detail the expectations of participants, their responsibilities, and their subsequent common-good work. In this regard, the photos also have as an aim the teaching of community spirit and the behaviours that coincide with it.

Throughout Portraits, everyday Americans are shown "doing their part"; always in conversation with the readers, the photos illustrate acts of kindness and citizenship that everyone can and should emulate. Pictures of relief workers and volunteers feature demonstrations of national can-do spirit and perseverance; despite what are generally understood as trying times in the wake of the disaster, the images sell the point that times are actually good, and that the collective

64 morale remains not just resilient but also stronger for having been challenged.

Whether comforting one another (424) or sharing a meal at a local restaurant between shifts (164 and 526), people who are "just like the readers" join in the recovery effort; while it is worth mentioning also that an inordinate number of the group photos centre on the work and associated costs of firefighting and policing

(with over one-third of the documentary photos following these two professional groups alone), the dedication of images to "regular folks" in the series is arguably more telling. When the text describing a photo depicting a mess line focuses not on the members of the NYPD being served (who are relegated to the pronoun

"those") but "a volunteer staff [who at a 24-hour relief centre] served about five thousand workers a day—a total of more than one hundred thousand free meals in the month after September 13" (164), the emphasis is placed clearly on the everyday people who make up the support staff. The message that everyone in the community has a duty to serve in some capacity in the recovery of the nation is heightened by several photographs of unanticipated helpers offering their gifts and service to others. The graffiti memorial mural put together by Tats Cm (407) brings previously marginalized artists and their creations into the post-9/11 democratic fold, and children shown constructing finger paintings for subway stations (221), organizing gift drives (371), and entertaining the relief workers

(441) defeat any imaginable excuse on the part of the readers not to serve in some, more advanced way; by capturing the symbolic sacrifices of these graffiti artists and children, these images jointly point an accusatory finger at anyone not willing to contribute as these "lesser" helpers have so enthusiastically done.

65 By doing one's part, the photos further assure the readers, one will have a

place in a renewed America, and cumulatively, everything that the group pictures

of Portraits has to say about this community suggests that such membership is a greatly desirable thing. To be an American is, to borrow a familiar expression, a way of life, really the only acceptable one post-9/11, so even a former outsider who ascribes to the stance and ideals of the community becomes an honorary member; logically, then, membership into the national memorial community is partnered with American-ness itself. Several victims of the attacks were not

American, yet, through their unplanned involvement in the patriotic master narrative of grief and recovery, they have become included in the national community; their death was a transformation that saw them included as honorary

Americans, so it becomes unnecessary, for instance, to acknowledge specific memorial efforts that were dedicated to victims who were citizens of other nations. Likewise, anyone touched by the tragedy of September 11 and the morally authentic outcomes of its relief efforts is invited into the collective. In rapid succession appear pictures of gifts from Haddasah, a Zionist women's organization with its headquarters based in New York and a sister centre in Israel

(474); tokens left by Canadian visitors in Battery Park (476); and a quilt commemorating September 11 that incorporates a "traditional Islamic screen pattern" that morphs into a representation of the World Trade Center (481). The inclusion of these culturally symbolic items in Portraits illuminates a generosity that goes well beyond the actions of individuals; instead, the photos of these offerings praise the community and its giving spirit towards those approaching

66 from outside its borders. In wartime environment similar to the one that Paul

Fussell remembers during the Second World War, which he describes as reductive and merely "a simplified sketch featuring a limited series of classifications into which people, in the process dehumanized and deprived of individuality or eccentricity, are fitted" (115), the photographs of Others helping the greater good appeals to the desire of the readers to be on the right side of the binary division between Us and Them; like the graffiti "hoodlums" and children, though, outsiders have found a place in the democracy of death through their spirited participation, a fact that reminds the readers that they, too, can be assured the same generosity regardless of time or place provided they exercise the same judicious effort in "doing their part."

Ultimately, the chorus of photos alludes to an overarching highmindedness that locks the growing community of mourners and their shared ideals securely in place within "a myth [held by Americans—both official and honorary] which enshrined their essential purity, a parable of good and evil"

(Fussell 164); this theme of American exceptionalism runs through all the group photographs (and their profile counterparts, as we will see later) to dominate the content and, inextricably, the finalized collective use of their images as fuel for impending moral crusades at home and abroad. In Death So Noble, Jonathan

Vance's no-nonsense summation of the ideological drive behind the First World

War and the public's lasting recollection of it works equally well when describing the overall sentiment of post-9/11 America as it prepared to march towards a global war on terror: "This was a war for righteousness, the best kind of war that

67 can be fought" (35). Understandably, exacting public support for any war effort

over the dissonance experienced upon considering the unpleasantness that it

promises relies upon a conviction of collective goodness, and Portraits, as a

commemorative object, includes documentary photos that make such a moral

self-identification obvious to even the most unsophisticated reader.

Consequently, it is no accident that flags and churches factor largely into the

majority of the group images; frequently appearing together, these iconic objects

serve to formulate a deliberate twinning equivalence between America and God, with the resultant association fast-tracking the global war on terror to unanimous acceptability. God, to believers and nonbelievers of Judeo-Christian traditions alike, is easily recognizable as a representation of a higher moral authority;

hence, the series of group photos in Portraits can be read as a pictorial account of the relationship between post-9/11 America and the immediately helpful concepts of loss, resurrection, and salvation that can be found in organized religion. Pictures of prayer services are juxtaposed against makeshift shrines covered in religious objects (180), and "God Bless" or the more complete "God

Bless America" appears on or beside flags placed at memorial sites; the portrayal of landmarks as the embodiment of intertwined nationalistic and Christian ideals marks the intensification of this theme. An enormous American flag all but obscures St. Patrick's Cathedral (196), and hundreds of onlookers peer skyward; it's unclear if they intend to worship God or their country, but the photo proposes that one should probably try to do both at the same time. Rockefeller Center also appears draped in a giant American flag and is conveniently situated in the

68 picture behind a holiday display that includes trumpeting golden angels (333).

Finally, the World Trade Center, a memorial focal point within the book, takes the connection between religious themes and iconography and nationalist interests further still in pictures that document the Twin Towers' spirituality and eventual divinity. A full-page picture of the wreckage at Ground Zero (378) is, I noticed, the grimmest photograph that appears in the book (as the only one that shows a disaster site as a point of interest), and it plays with an artistic ambiguity that the other pictures, with their straightforward representations of post-9/11 events, do not cater to aesthetically: more like a cover of The Watchtower than a journalistic photograph, it bears to the reader "the charred shell of a building that was once a part of the World Trade Center complex. Remnants of steel beams form the shape of a cross" (379). The visuals build upon what the accompanying text evinces: light pours in from behind the crossed beams as if supplied by a divine source, and the chiaroscuro effect achieved through the selective contrast of positive and negative space—the dark debris and the illumination behind the cross—signify the presence of God at Ground Zero, as if to suggest that God somehow witnesses the losses suffered there and will assist America in its redemption. Other images shift attention away from providence and towards the immortality of the buildings themselves; in the penultimate full-page photograph in the text, a model of the Towers is set up as a memorial outside Engine 54 of the New York Fire Department, and it appears here as it is remembered, not as

Ground Zero but as a better version of itself, flagged with the insignia of inclusiveness (flags, badges, emblems, memorial tokens) that define its new

69 symbolic afterlife as the icon of September 11 and all its various, compacted moralistic meanings. In this final application, the Twin Towers have joined the arsenal of images that serve as abbreviated, tangible substitutes for a newly complicated national identity; by smoothing over any inherent contradictions and allowing people to "see" what America is, these images buttress an idealized vision of self that the community can then rally around and fight for.

In retrieving the familiar images of public mourning, the images effectively coach the reader in the "appropriate" memorial reactions—the right sprit, the right emotions. The ability of Portraits as a commemorative text to initiate, as if on cue, a specific and unanimous emotional response leads Simon Stow to label it an exemplum of a "pornography of grief," an extension of the body genres (such as porn and horror) that tap into and manipulate human feeling:

It was not enough simply to catalogue the dead, as in previous individual

memorializations; the dead had to be made attractive to the living in a kind

of emotional necrophilia...

Like pornography then, the "Portraits" offer a multitude of

possibilities for the physical expression of stimulation that they seek to

generate—in this case tears—and one in which there is a deferral of

satisfaction for the insatiable reader... (235)

It is on this last assumption in particular—that the reader is left dissatisfied—that

Stow takes a different path to the same conclusion as I, which is that the whole point of Portraits is to teach a productive dissatisfaction. Unlike conventional pornography or horror, however, which are designed to tease and pleasure at the

70 individual level, the reaction that "pornographic grief elicits is more of an organized mass dissatisfaction, which is subsequently channelled in the form of moral energy. While Stow concludes that Portraits "must, by necessity, have an end in order that the righteous get their reward and the evil doers get punished

[but instead is] in both style, and intent... committed to the endless mourning ...to the claim that 'We will never forget'" (234), as if suggesting that these objectives are mutually exclusive, I see another possibility, which is that these are complementary outcomes: precisely because the book withholds closure from the readers—Portraits's primary purpose is to orchestrate national grief, not to provide solutions for it—the audience is then left to seek resolution through other means, which, in its many references to the proper manner of commemoration, the tribute essentially decides. Failing that, however, the reader can still be eased into a manageable passivity, which a more paranoid interpretation of recent past events could view as responsible for a different (if not more desirable) set of opportunities for the State:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action,

or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been

aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that

there is nothing "we" can do—but who is that "we"?—and nothing "they"

can do either—and who are "they"?—then one starts to get bored, cynical,

apathetic.

71 ...People don't become inured to what they are shown—if that's the

right way to describe what happens—because of the quantity of images

dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. (Sontag 101-103)

Far from being a deficiency on the part of the text, the unsatisfying open- endedness of Portraits generates a moral energy that does not necessarily

require the readers to be active for its effectiveness to be realized; even if the audience is merely groomed to be receptive to an ideological climate that is conducive to nation-building, instead of outwardly acting on sown emotions, the memorial has already succeeded.

Extending the proposition that Portraits is pornographic in its details, it seems sensible to me at this time to take this logic in a slightly different direction to address another aspect of this analogy, which is obscenity, in order to discuss what the documentary photos make a point of not documenting. The lay definition of pornography (literally "whore-painting") revolves around the purveyance of material that is deemed somehow inappropriate; as Stow notes in his essay, the physical immediacy of the "body genre" may have something to do with exactly what gets labelled pornography. Nevertheless, examining Portraits specifically as a work of pornographic grief has relied exclusively on what it shows, instead of what it does not show. As with so many other things that we understand (some of which I have already addressed in this paper), what we choose not to show ourselves is decided by consensus; in the case of the historical group photographs in Portraits, it is useful to approach at least briefly the material that does not appear in the photographs. Not surprisingly, there are

72 no visual or verbal references whatsoever to the celebrations that followed the attacks (in Palestine, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom, for example), nor are there photographs of the looting that allegedly took place, which William

Langewiesche describes in American Ground. Furthermore, there is also a conspicuous lack of attention given to the dead themselves—the victims of the attacks themselves or those on either side of the global war on terror. These omissions speak to the designations of good and poor taste, but the decisions that produce these designations and determine what is memorialized and what is untouchably obscene also starkly reveal the mythic limits of moral self- understanding; the selection and display of memorial photography outline the process of bringing a usable past (Vance's term) out of "[photographs that everyone recognizes [and are] now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about" (Sontag 85). One may recall a pivotal scene in the dystopic cult film Blade Runner in which the protagonist Deckard explains the substitution of photos—"somebody else's" memories—being involved in the manufacture of personal recollection and experiences and, as a result, a sense of personal identity; Deckard is educated by his investigations, as we are watching his progress in the text, that control assumes the form of prescriptive memory, an apparatus through which "if we gift them [replicants, who are perfect copies of humans and work as slaves] with a past, we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions, and consequently, we can control them better." In essence, the same replacement is at work at a national and even international level following September 11, with a democracy of

73 nationalized grief paradoxically being defined by a concerted de-emphasis of atrocity and death, which have the potential to stir up individual feelings of horror and fixation that distract the population from the preferred project of collective memorial instruction. Instead, loss is established and shared through a filtered set of domesticated images that work to "lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes [as] sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan" (Sontag 85); besides establishing the foundation of collective memory, these totemic images also functionally obliterate the intrusion of images unfriendly to the community network by defining these as obscene and "unpatriotic," all while, taken to another sort of extremity, the overexposure of public memorial imagery becomes the landscape of "everything that is uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect—everything that usurps the rare and precious space of appearances" (Baudrillard 94). A tribute's predetermined moral trajectory keeps the viewers in their place whilst interpreting imagery, and there can be no other option beyond its limits or those of the community it stands for besides the labels of "antisocial" obscenity and deviance.

Once the reader is safely initiated into the community of national grievers through the larger documentary photographs, the individual obituaries in Portraits continue the project of stimulating a scripted civic memory. Towards this end, the content is both formally and thematically invested in the idea of immediate assembly. As one comes finally to the portraits promised by the text, the concentration on portraiture is itself a telling property of the text's memorial

74 efforts. The compilation of obituaries pays homage to the diversity of the victims even as their diminutive size and uniformity (their organization and black-and- white presentation) suggests an aim to override their individual importance with an enforced lack of distinctiveness; everyone is special, so no one is special.

Indeed, what stands out about the stories and pictures of the victims is precisely their ordinariness: stories gravitate towards the familiar experiences of family, jobs, hobbies, first loves, first homes, and we are invited to share the enthusiasm for "Banjos and Big Dreams" that Darren Bohan had (47), or learn to appreciate why Stephanie Irby was "The Expert on Captain Kirk" (230)—though, notably, we are not given more information about aspects of their lives that are just as common but unflattering and, therefore, inappropriate (that Bohan disliked his job and that Irby played hooky are two points that are alluded to and then hastily glossed over in their respective stories). Nevertheless, even with an expurgated list, the informality of the Chicken Soup for the Soul-like moments gathered encourage a sense of familiarity and fraternity between the reader and the victims, and only a few stories in, it becomes reasonably easy to believe that I as the observer know them through the few strange and intimate details provided to acquaint me with the small, thumbnail images appearing in the left corner of each piece. In another self-reflexive comment, Portraits includes a further explanation of the approach taken with the portraits themselves:

The profiles were never intended to be obituaries, at least in the traditional

sense of the word—the taking stock of their accomplishments, their length

determined by an editor's opinion of the impact of a life. They were closer

75 to snapshots—concise, impressionistic, their power at least as much

emotional as intellectual. And they were utterly democratic, (ix)

Hence, Portraits proclaims itself more yearbook than elegy, thereby situating its democratic experiment more clearly: the dead—that is, Our dead—are made

"real" through their resurrection and ad hoc incorporation into the democracy of death and subsequent absorption into the post-9/11 moral community. They are each given a "second life," which Michelet posits in Benedict Anderson's

Imagined Communities as the responsibility of the historian: "to speak on behalf of large numbers of anonymous dead people...[and] say what they 'really' meant and 'really' wanted, since they themselves 'did not understand'" (198). In this vein, Portraits's earlier mission statement, that the profiles were not to be understood as obituaries, is accurate; instead, these "snapshots" are to be taken as biographies that mark the transition of the dead into their second lives (in history) and also reaffirm their continuance as participating figures in Our communities, including the ones that we can only anticipate after realizing our losses. As it turns out, the task of formulating a democracy is easier when dealing with dead people, whose unobstructed biographies and resultant second lives can also clear the way for contriving nationalistic agreement among the living.

Indeed, to count the dead of September 11 among the members of the democratic community being built (or reinstated) confirms the importance of a collectivist history in renewing a sense of shared identity and purpose in the absence of other nexuses: history as myth is unspecified and does not rely upon

76 existing background similarities in language, nationalities, ethnicities, or culture.

History can, in fact, stand in for all these things because it is motivated by and materializes from social usage, even while it is read as a system of facts (Barthes

119-131). Through this act of substitution (of the figurative, the situational in place of the literal) it becomes possible to extend or contract the boundaries of nationhood in a wholly unrestricted manner. As an illustration, the 329 victims of the September 11 attacks who were not American have their nationalities simply unmentioned or otherwise offered in a passing, abbreviated way in the anecdote, or, as the profile story of Robert Halligan "Shopping across the Pond" indicates, as a past life relinquished in exchange for a new, improved niche in the

United States:

To a proud Englishman, America is a country of vexing insufficiencies. Its

supermarkets know not of HP. (House of Parliament) sauce and tins of

steak and kidney pie. Marmite, sadly, remains a mystery...

Yet for someone who clung to his British identity, Mr. Halligan

flourished in America, where he moved with Jerri, his American wife. He

gardened here, played golf and danced beautifully. He was a kind,

solicitous grandfather of 10 with a knack for joke-telling. And here he

celebrated the holiday he loved even more than Christmas: as a citizen of

two countries, Robert Halligan adored Thanksgiving. (205)

Halligan's anecdote, with its purposely hyperbolic description of the problems faced by immigrants in America—that favourite foods like Marmite were unattainable—sets the stage for a profound reformation: once this change has

77 been completed, even a hardcore Brit, we are informed, could learn to prefer his new home and way of life, to the extent that he "adored" Thanksgiving above all other celebrations and accepted the absence of favourite snacks as "one of the gifts of becoming American...[and] embracing 'real food'" (Vance, notes to the author). Portraits suggests that this scheme of naturalization is even more fully realized after death; death is the last stage of this transformative act in which the victim becomes not just an American but an exemplary one. Moreover, in the case of post-9/11 America, one need not even be alive to be one of Us, as the tribute democracy of Portraits suitably indicates. All 1910 profiles promise

"stories, anecdotes, tiny but telling details that seemed to reveal something true and essential about how each person lived" (ix); in dutifully providing these details to the reader, the profiles reflect an aspiration to some communion between the reader and the victims:

They were our husbands and wives, our sons and daughters, our mothers

and fathers, our brothers, cousins, neighbours, friends, colleagues, lovers.

Busboys and businessmen, pilots and programmers, secretaries and

socialites, firefighters and financiers. They were heroes by choice, they

were heroes by chance. They were loved, and they were lost.

Soon after the horrific events of September 11, newsroom staffers

at The New York Times began to ask about the real people, the names

and the faces behind the unimaginable statistics. Their efforts...gathered

force over the ensuing weeks and eventually became a cultural

phenomenon on a national scale. Each day, readers in New York and

78 across the country spent a few moments getting to know the doting fathers

and loving spouses, gourmet cooks, fanatical sportsmen, partygoers,

church elders, pranksters and perfectionists—the astonishing diversity of

unique individuals. And as we made the transition from mourning our loss

to celebrating these lives, a gentle note of uplift was sounded, and we

began to think about healing, (book jacket notes)

The ambition of the "utterly democratic" tribute project in Portraits is evident in its description of its subjects; insistent on reconciling diversity and individuality, the text seems to leave no demographic behind (except sisters, who strangely receive only an implied nod through the mention of lost brothers). Moreover, by sharing minute and intimate tidbits of information about the featured victims' lives, the profiles rescue the dead from anonymity by making them more like us, relatable and, therefore, no longer strangers; their deaths become equated with real losses. The profiles, arranged in alphabetical order, each begin not as a standard obituary would (with the name followed by the dates of birth and death, respectively), but with a "headline" announcing some specific personal detail:

Lucy Fishman was "Antsy on the First Day of School" (158), Douglas B. Gurian was "Barefoot for Days" (200), Gregory Trost was "A Human Jukebox" (505).

The smallness of the details juxtaposed with the enormity of their common doom shapes the audience's logical movement towards a prescribed understanding of the greater picture:

The detail as the index of poignant loss—the toothpaste on the

toothbrush, the minute and the familiar—embodies that which we cherish

79 against what is foreign and terrifying, that which protects against the war

on terrorism. In measuring disaster, the smaller the marker, the bigger the

loss seems to be the rule of incommensurability...You accede to the big

through the little: the "telling detail" testifies to the big whole, the hole left

by the disappearance of the loved one within the global identity of victim.

(Miller 122)

Moving from portrait to portrait, readers are made acquainted with the fallen, who are, of course, described as being "just like them"; the explicit celebration of averageness expectedly leads to a certain comparison, too, not merely between the audience of the text and their dead "neighbours" in the profiles, but also between the nobility of the dead, who are characterized by their great contributions as everyday Americans, and that of the text's consumers.

The elevation of ordinary, everyday living to heroic status, even taken to the catholic scale that it is in Portraits, is a personally familiar thing in terms of how the dead are spoken about: the editing of people's lives to include only favourable, venerable, or sentimental material (with the cardinal rule being not to

"speak ill of the dead") is generally understood as the only acceptable way to have a conversation about the deceased. Simon Stow refers to Thomas Mallon's identification of a very expected, very human inclination at work in Portraits towards a "universally positive depiction of the dead—in which 'anyone depressed about his weight became a "gentle giant" and every binge drinker was the life of the party'" (234). Such sentiments are to be pretended towards the deceased, even if they are not felt, and one need look no further than Camus's

80 The Outsider to find an example of how abnormal it is not to grieve in an acceptable way: the ordeal faced by the character Meursault, who faces severe prosecution not for the murder he commits, perse, but his "coldness" towards his mother's death, aptly demonstrates the narrow interpretative boundaries placed on grieving as a social practice. In this sense, all obituaries conform to the same generic social and cultural limits, and Portraits is no exception. However, the fact that the subjects included are (A) everyday people whose lives are unknown to the general public, and (B) victims of a national tragedy arouses also a re- evaluation of identity, both at the individual and national level, with the latter ultimately proving to be the derivative of the former. Each of the short narratives acts as more than the glorification of a single life; as part of a collective tribute project, each is also meant to be a commentary on American achievement and exceptional moral character, and the tacit suggestion reiterated over and over by these statements is that these values define being an American, such that, as

Jonathan Vance asserts, every war memorial is by definition patriotic, as it necessarily "renders a value judgment on the sacrifice [of "innocent" lives]" (29).

David Simpson, in his evaluation of Portraits, correlates its commemorative agency and its patriotic bent more explicitly still:

[The snapshots] were clearly being put to work in the cause of a patriotic

momentum....None here cheated on her spouse or abused his children, or

was indifferent to community activities. One tends of course to speak only

good things of the dead, but even within the expected bounds of memorial

81 decorum, the notices seem formulaic. They seem regimented, even

militarized, made to march to the beat of a single drum (23).

The profiles, by detailing the undaunted, unquestionable goodness of the dead, collectively present viewers with a challenge, namely, to demonstrate their commitment to these manifest American values and their embodiment in fellow— now fallen—Americans against the stark relief of the senselessness of terror.

Once this association between American-ness and moral character is established, it is a short walk from there to the moral duty and the moral crusade that follows to find restitution for the loss of self represented by the loss of the

1910 lives outlined in the book. The mission to mend what September 11 broke, literally and metaphorically speaking, would be the charge of all "true" Americans, those united by the democracy of death and living within its altered borders, and amongst them, the tributaries to this collective movement within the "democracy of craftsmanship" (ix).

The democracy of craftsmanship is how those behind the production of

Portraits would come to describe the overarching theme of both their communal undertaking and its outcome. A natural extension of the tendency in Portraits towards elevating all characters and practices post-9/11 to those serving the

"greater good," the production of Portraits, the Times staff insist, was nothing short of a public service. So noble was their shared cause, in fact, that everyone involved in the project abandoned themselves to the democratic spirit of the work:

82 Often, on so huge a story as the World Trade Center disaster, the writing

of shorter pieces falls to younger reporters. On the "Portraits" project, it

became an emblem of pride to join in the largely anonymous labor of

creating these pieces; some of our most senior correspondents insisted on

participating.

I have seen reporters crying at their telephones, even as they

summoned the professional discipline to keep reporting, keep writing until

the task was done. They were inspired and sometimes driven by an

awareness of what these pieces had come to mean to the grieving families

and friends and to that larger community of Americans who mourned for

all the World Trade Center victims, strangers to them or not, just as in an

earlier day their parents mourned for the dead of Pearl Harbor, (vii)

Once again, the all-for-one narrative, with the help of its explicit comparison between the American home front response after Pearl Harbor and that of 9/11, provides an attractive, albeit incomplete, description of the work behind the scenes that went into producing the text; the experience of these reporters, too, relates back to the notion of some patriotic responsibility that is credited with the inherent rejuvenating energy of the memorial text. However, this narrative exists in aggressive opposition to certain realities having to do with how labour is assigned and organized; in the case of Portraits, some of these contradictory elements appear in the book itself. Alongside the praise of "largely anonymous labor," there are in the acknowledgements the names of the reporters who wrote the articles, as well as special mention of those contributors whose work was

83 outstandingly prolific or otherwise "particularly distinctive" (557). Once more, there is a roll call moment in the text to mark the individual merits of the 143 writers who submitted profiles; also included, however, in very close proximity to the rest and without any overt self-consciousness on the part of the text or the editorial director, Mitchel Levitas, are the names of the three reporters who wrote more than seventy-five profiles each: Jan Hoffman, N. R. Kleinfield, and Barbara

Stewart (557). Here the incongruence between democracy and individual achievement produces a certain self-contradiction, one that is advanced by comments that Howell Raines made following his tenure as executive editor of the New York Times: "While going at a dead run to cover the fast-breaking news of the post-9/11 period, Jon Landman and a group of his editors and reporters invented the "Portraits of Grief series...That special section helped the Times win the Pulitzer Board's highest honor: the award for public service" (Raines qtd. in

Simpson 39). The ambitions of a democracy of craftsmanship coincide tidily with the narrative of community service that characterizes the text and its supposed impetus even as they appear to run up against the motives of commercial and professional success. Nevertheless, what a memorial text such as Portraits manages to do so skilfully is to merge these seemingly antagonistic goals into the single uncomplicated ideological statement made by a public service—that is, national memorial—mandate:

The patriotic effort thus merges into and emerges out of a commercial

one: the two are not simply distinguishable. Neither is simply the cause of

the other, but without both we wonder whether either would have been

84 open to this kind of articulation and circulation...instrumentally, each

facilitates the other. (Simpson 40)

Through its purifying methods, public service becomes in itself a challenge

presented by memorialization, such that any point of fracture or dissonance can

be securely addressed and dismissed by its mention. Far from contravening the

ends or the means of commemoration, self-service can be dignified and elevated

by its association with nation-building memories and the monomyth of

exceptionalism that they nourish.

In The Intelligence of Evil, Jean Baudrillard sends his propositions on

simulation into paranoid overdrive by arguing that the complete dissolution of

reality is by now "an accomplished fact," and that the whole of human experience

is now limited to the domain of Integral Reality. Using suicide as his controlling

metaphor, he moves on to explore the paradoxically inverse tasks of the image of witnessing and "performing" an event:

An image, I believe, affects us directly, below the level of representation:

at the level of intuition, of perception. At that level, the image is always an

absolute surprise. At least it should be.

And in this case, unfortunately, one may say that images are rare—

the power of the image being, most of the time, intercepted by all that we

try to make it say...

We commonly say that the real has disappeared beneath a welter

of signs and images, and it is true that there is a violence of the image.

But that violence is substantially offset by the violence done to the image;

85 its exploitation for documentary purposes, as testimony or message, its

exploitation for moral, political or promotional ends, or simply for purposes

of information...

This is where the destiny of the image comes to an end, both as

fateful illusion and vital illusion. (92)

The problem of the image, according to Baudrillard's logic, is the overproduction

of meaning, so that what gets captured is not simply what is but what should or

should not be; so, the image moves from bearing witness to being only "an

operator of visibility" (93). The job granted to Portraits as a tribute text represents the close of Baudrillard's logical cycle that sees the image go from mimetic

medium to the site of a symbolic self-destruction; the motive for photographic virtuality, as it is for all heightened simulation in the theoretical model set forth in

Intelligence, is perfection, and its inescapable outcome is self-annihilation. The

memorial essentializes one angle of this doomed progression, one that follows the path of engineering a simulacrum of an idealized democracy built on the distilled notions of exceptionalism that both typifies and directs the reception of commemorative work as it simultaneously assigns the tribute to monotonous exploitation.

For Orwell, as for Baudrillard, democracy is meaningless precisely when it manages too many meanings. Explaining the promiscuousness of the concept of democracy in "Politics and the English Language," he credits its slipperiness as a device that can very usefully obscure written language but largely ignores its significance in the language of photography. In this tradition, what Portraits

86 practises is indicative of a more complete manipulation; here the images that it presents as the documentation of a democratic community actually are the community, the event. By stipulating the terms of our engagement with the community that it helps to define, Portraits leaves us with no options other than to buy or not to buy into conditional membership; with the difficulties attendant to the latter, it is also easy to argue that this choice itself is, at its most innocent, a charade; taken with more care, it is nothing less than a test.

87 Chapter Three

Charm Defensive: The Pentagon Memorial and Administered Memory

In the spring of 2000, I was in the throes of what John Mayer was just a few years away from popularizing as the quarter-life crisis. In retrospect, I think that having a mass culture handle for the angst and paralysis of being twenty-three, comparatively over-schooled, broke, dull, and seemingly unemployable may have helped me navigate my feelings more productively. However, at the time, there was no name for the experience and no apparent way out of it. After realizing that I couldn't draw and was too much of a naif to survive the corporate environment, I was inspired by the old adage to seek out a niche more suitable to my "can't-do" personality, so that September I began learning to be a teacher.

To be more specific, I was enrolled in the B.Ed, program at the University of British Columbia, where I was to receive instruction on how to become a high school English teacher. I was also part of the experimental Social Justice cohort, which I signed up for because I thought it sounded important and made me feel good about what I would be doing for the next twelve months. There was, expectedly, the practical work regarding classroom management, lesson plans, rubrics, and legal issues, but I would say that most of the time I and my thirty-odd classmates were trafficking in the grander ideas of social responsibility and the duty of transmitting the "hidden curriculum" by taking advantage of the opportune

"teachable moments." The hidden curriculum, we learned, would be the alpha and omega of our professional duty as educators, not the three-R's trivia of the

88 official curricula; students would come into our classes to learn about dangling

participles but leave equipped to be improved citizens. The writer of one of my

B.Ed, textbooks puts it more poetically than I by proclaiming to the student

teacher that "the essential business of the classroom is to provide an

environment for reflection, and a venue for discussions about experience and

life" (Leggo 11). O Captain, my Captain!

Nevertheless, outside the enumerations of our future noble deeds as

practitioners of the hidden curriculum, I gradually came to see another, less

comfortable product of our efforts, a sort of hidden hidden curriculum at work.

The hidden curriculum already alluded to would be the undeclared but essential work of socializing students, specifically with the intent of eliciting "pro-social"

behaviours. The logic of the school, after all, is to train the very young for the

pragmatic and social responsibilities that await them in adult life; the various roles that the pupil plays out in the classroom, from the most utilitarian (sitting at a desk for hours, waiting in line) to the most idealistic (helping in food drives for the

needy) can be understood as scaled-down "training" versions of grown-up scenarios. However, as the theoretical line between the teaching of social responsibility and that of obedience is at most times troublingly thin, it requires only very few paranoid adjustments to move from classroom instruction to institutionalized thought experiment; it is on this point that the actual motivation behind the hidden curriculum becomes more opaque, to the extent that it becomes as convenient as it is problematic to suggest that a twice-hidden curriculum is necessarily at work in the educational act. Towards the ends of the

89 hidden hidden curriculum, the role of the educator, insofar as it is interested in

encouraging thinking and behaviour that a given culture regards as beneficial or

"healthy," is necessarily invested in the identification of abnormality and its

subsequent rehabilitation. It is no accident, therefore, that Michel Foucault's

Discipline and Punish presents education as a variety of the disciplinary

apparatus that also includes the military and corrections (police and jails), with all

three institutions actively involved in defining the margins of "normal" citizenship:

Like surveillance and with it, normalization becomes one of the great

instruments of power...For the marks that once indicated status, privilege,

and affiliation were increasingly replaced—or at least supplemented—by a

whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a

homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification,

hierarchization and the distribution of rank. In a sense, the power of

normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it

possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to

render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. It is easy to

understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal

equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces,

as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shadings of

individual differences. (184)

Observed against Foucault's "disciplinary gaze," to which teaching either knowingly or unknowingly contributes, so much of what gets labelled classroom management becomes readable as a means of creating a level of

90 standardization that is crucial to establishing and conserving control or, at the

very least, explaining it away. The most "learner-centred" of hidden curricula— with their aspirations to nurture inclusion, compassion, social responsibility—are

nevertheless implicated in the broader public operations of control when they

participate in the teaching of permission and prohibition: being told to put up one's hand before speaking, to keep one's eyes on one's own page, not to pass

notes during a lesson, to "play nice"—these are instructions that everyone learns in the course of picking up what are understood as commonsense manners, but they are also demonstrations that imply that behaviours can effectively be

Taylorized in school just as physical activities can be Taylorized in the factory: the objective is efficiency, and this efficiency is contingent on uniformity. Put most simply, teaching to the twice-hidden curriculum is, at its core, the business of encouraging consensus against the threat of "exteriority" and is a course of action that segues seamlessly into the greater territorializing designs of the State:

If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of

capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce,

money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined

directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movements

of subjects and objects...Gravity, gravitas, such is the essence of the

State. (Deleuze and Guattari 386, my italics)

Personally, I do not find the notion of school as direct tributary to the state's centripetal control all that surprising, given the inclination in teaching towards standardized practices (final exams, attendance, percentage grading,

91 etc.), but what piques my curiosity is the more recent surreptitiousness in

education that sees this "fixed paths" directive ensconced in democratic

engagement, even entertainment (or the catchier novelty of edutainment).

Whereas in the military or in policing, the enforcement of normal standards of

behaviour is represented fairly transparently in the nature of the work and the

actions that constitute it (especially in the latter, with its alternative name

Corrections laying bare the imperative to reform or rehabilitate deviance through institutionalized techniques and apparatuses), the contributions of education to normalization are frustratingly indistinct. Considered in concert with the sheer ubiquity of education—whose assumption here is based upon the parallel understandings that (A) unlike military service and incarceration, basic formal education is almost uniformly required (at least within the Canadian/American

"bubble" that situates both my own academic and cultural background and the limits of my research in this particular project) and that (B) the limits of education are not affixed to those of formal schooling but extend, promiscuously and clandestinely, into other areas of what we know as everyday living—the "ever- friendly" omnipresence of education and what I view as its very firm investment in the twice-hidden curriculum towards engendering normal values become complementary components: returning to my own B.Ed, experiences momentarily, I recall the oft-repeated practicum joke about having "just another day in the benevolent dictatorship" and acknowledge the accidental irony of intention present in the telling of the oxymoronic joke and in our service. The definition of education that I process and apply in this chapter implies a

92 recognition of a defensive strategy built into the act: it is not the production of the pro-social but the elimination of the antisocial that is the true harvest of edutainment (a term whose mainstream ascendency has been confirmed by

Microsoft Word's spellchecking: we can see it's actually a household word now), with public approval co-opted through the myth of democratic influence.

There are two notable offshoots of the historical trend in educational practice to de-emphasize gradgrindian fact-teaching in favour of packaging teaching in a more democratic, experiential, and learner-centred approach.4 One is the contemporary "interpretive" memorial space, a category for which the recently Pentagon Memorial serves as a suitable ambassador, and the other is the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books meant for school-aged readers;

I have found in my investigations into the former category that a preliminary understanding of the famous schoolbooks effectively explains the methodology of contemporary commemoration currently at play. Choose Your Own Adventure books, which were relaunched in 2006 and made the leap to iPhone application in December 2008 ("Choose Your Own Adventure launches on iPhone"), are emblematic of the "discovery" model of education that came to the fore in the

1970s and 1980s; ChooseCo's product is "[w]idely commended for its appeal to reluctant readers, the interactive, multiple-choice multiple-ending series is among the most popular series for children ever published." The CYOA line of books is based on the premise that the reader will be motivated by questions at the end of

4 Hilde S. Hein's The Museum in Transition dedicates a full chapter to describing the transitional movement in North American and European education in the late 1960s from what she terms a "banking model" of teaching and learning to a discovery-based model; she cites the Cold War- situated emphasis on both behaviourist psychology and scientific advancement as the impetus of this educational paradigm shift (108-126). 93 a unit to make choices that would ladder up to the next unit, which in turn present more questions, and so on, until he or she arrives at a conclusion to the

"adventure." However, in this exercise the reader is only free to choose an adventure within the confines of the novel's closed system of options, and amongst these, it is typically very obvious to the young readers targeted what the preferred choices are, with the selection of pro-social options—those that involved helping a character in peril, for instance—being rewarded by streaming into other events that result in a "happy" ending that usually involves some form of treasure or monetary award, and antisocial or needlessly "mean" choices putting the reader on a track towards an undesirable ending. Consequently, the books promise choice but actively regulate the reader's selections so that the socially approved messages and cultural myths they collectively serve do not disappear within the matrices of individual readers' decision-making; furthermore, the instituted use of the books primarily to coax unwilling readers through the simulation of free choice presents its own hypocritical suppositions about teaching, with the bitter pill of instruction becoming palatable only once the reader is sufficiently distracted to be convinced that what he or she is doing is not at all educational. In tandem, these contradictions inherent to CYOA capture its foundational myth of democratic participation ("I can choose my own adventure!") and the purifying nature of this myth that links the dynamics of CYOA engagement with the larger initiatives of the twice-hidden curriculum and the hegemonic properties it represents. In such a context, the imitation of choice works to justify a system in which there is no free choosing, and where, by

94 "mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it...our

'freedoms' themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom" (Zizek,

Welcome to the Desert of the Real 2)

As a didactic resource, the contemporary "reflective" memorial subscribes to an operational set of traits and features corresponding very closely to those of the Choose Your Own Adventure logic. The difference in project scale—with the memorial exemplary of a collective educational undertaking and CYOA readership standing for an insular experience—becomes largely inconsequential upon scrutinizing the "personalized" experiences that commute with their shared, sanitized territorializing inclinations. The interpretive memorial takes the shape of an experience that is at once a personal feeling and a public statement, such that, "Even as we stand, side by side, simultaneously undergoing our separate experiences, 'shaped' by a museum environment, we are prompted to carry away the judgment of a 'same' and publicly acknowledged reality. This is the object to be learned" (Hein 110). The memorial space, besides prompting this value judgment in the viewer, is responsible for the form in which this educational experience takes place as well as the indoctrinating conclusions at which the visitor arrives; one "discovers" the space and its message, but this discovery is scripted by the memorial itself: "In order to ensure educational success...overcontrolling the range of possible discoveries [means] that what observers find will actually illustrate what they were intended to see" (Hein 118).

In this manner, memorial discourse post-9/11 is responsible for applying the same pedagogical formula found in the CYOA books; there is, on the one hand,

95 the extroverted encouragement of democratic participation, yet, simultaneously, there also exists the underlying controlling subtext of normalcy, which tries the viewer for a membership that is in actuality the sole acceptable outcome and confirms the limits of personal discovery—and memorial discourse in general— according to the prohibitions of an imposed reality, which Jean Baudrillard describes in The Intelligence of Evil:

Any question of reality, of its obviousness and its principle is deemed

unacceptable and condemned as negationist.

The charge against you: what do you make of the reality of misery,

suffering and death?

Now, it isn't about taking sides on material violence or on the

violence of misfortune—it is about a line you are forbidden to cross, the

line marking a taboo on reality, a taboo also on even the slightest attempt

at interfering with a clear division between good and evil, on pain of being

regarded as a scoundrel or an imposter.

The affirmation or contestation of reality, of the reality principle, is,

then, a political choice, and almost a religious one, in that any

infringement of this principle is sacrilegious... (Baudrillard, Intelligence of

Evil 23)

Baudrillard, in explaining the situation of historical "obviousness," borrows from the language of Holocaust denial to demonstrate the inflexible contours of one such "reality"5; the standardization of opinion over the events of September 11

5 A much more detailed discussion of situating the "right" memorial approach to the topic of the Holocaust can be found in Edward T. Linenthal's Preserving Memory, which details, amongst 96 likewise attests to the barriers of an understood and accepted taboo. Choice in

this system is akin to the "choice" presented to the patrons in the restaurant

scene in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, who have the freedom to choose what signage is

placed upon the identical slop they are seen eating—this so that they know what

to call said slop and can justify the menu's invariance ("your duck I'orange—bon

appetit!'). In a similarly closed system, despite the calls for an "open" and

democratic process in the planning and management of memorial spaces

following September 11, one's individual participatory actions at any stage of the

commemorative process are kept limited to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

(perhaps a preferred expression here would be "Choose Your Own Tribute"?)

dynamic.

In light of the conceptual shotgun wedding between public indoctrination

and democratic participation that the post-9/11 memorial works to naturalize, it is

unsurprising that at the time of this writing two of three major September 11

memorial projects remain in limbo after failing to get the logistics of democratic

myth precisely right. The temporal proximity of the 9/11 memorial to its subject

matter has produced rather spectacular failures that stand in stark relief against the tidiness of the Pentagon Memorial's progression. The rebuild effort at the

World Trade Center site has been repeatedly stalled by arguments over design decisions and those appointed to make design decisions. The rebuild project, initially spearheaded by Daniel Libeskind (who just before his appointment on the

World Trade Center project had completed the Jewish Museum Berlin), other challenges in creating the United States Holocaust Museum, the struggle to develop a "national memory of the Holocaust...without deviating from the established narrative of the Holocaust" (26, my italics). 97 underwent extensive revisions to address practical design flaws (wind resistance,

technological upgrading) as well as problems with security; on top of these

concerns, some families of the WTC deceased have argued incessantly over the

memorial design, citing inadequacies in the placement of the names of the dead

and with the semiotics of the design elements themselves (e.g. the fact that part

of the memorial is underground has been frequently been criticized for being "too

depressing"). Further, the involvement of more and more people in the rebuild

process has only multiplied its unknown and discordant quantities, resulting in

indefinite construction delays and subsequent unanticipated costs: in a Port

Authority press release on July 1, 2008 authored by executive director

Christopher O. Ward, it was made plain that "[t]he dates and costs of the World

Trade Center projects that the public has been told are not realistic. [Those

involved in the rebuild] are not going to make any of them" and that "it's no longer

a question of if all of these projects will get built. Nothing in [the] assessment

leads [to beliefs] that any of these projects won't be completed as promised. The

questions are when and for how much" (Port Authority press release #68). The

project shortfalls confirmed by the Port Authority's statement have become

embarrassingly apparent to the point where there is nothing to be done outside of

candid acknowledgement: while continuous delays have pushed the completion

date no less than three years past its originally planned September 11, 2011 (the tenth anniversary of the attacks), cost estimates have ballooned from the original

projected cost of $10-12 billion to current total estimates ranging anywhere from

$21 billion to $100 billion (with these projections exclusive of long-term

98 maintenance expenditures). Ward's address tries to end on a positive note by

citing amongst the good news about the reconstruction the fact that the

"Freedom Tower is rising above sea level," but the achievement of finishing 105

feet (35 feet of foundation plus 70 feet of steel framing) is dwarfed by the

immensity of the key building's 1776-foot goal; excluding the 400 feet of

antennae, there still remains almost 1300 feet of building left to be erected as of

the progress report released February 11, 2009 ("One WTC Steel Rising"), and

after the most recent public dispute over a project name change (the Freedom

Tower was officially renamed One World Trade Center in late March 2009,

despite many cries of protest against the new tag) the future success of the

rebuild project as a whole currently remains undetermined.

The Shanksville Flight 93 Memorial, despite its comparatively smaller

scale alongside the WTC reconstruction effort, has fared no better in terms of

reaching its fundraising and completion objectives. At a total cost of $57-58

million, the Shanksville project costs a fraction of its New York counterpart—less,

in fact, than 9% of the cost of the WTC's least expensive building, the $700

million World Trade 7. However, while much of the cost needs to be offset by

private donations amounting to an estimated $30 million, fundraising has so far succeeded in collecting only $11 million. At last count in February 2009,

remaining funds were estimated at $20 million [this according to the Pittsburgh

Post-Gazette—though I can't yet see how the numbers add up: $30 million plus

$11 million equals $41 million, leaving, by my count, $16-17 million left to be collected, not $20 million], not including the cost of the access road, which would

99 be paid for by the state; this last point is the subject of a heated argument within

Pennsylvania, with citizens of that state feeling unduly burdened with the cost of

putting in an access route to a national memorial. Additionally, the design originally selected for the memorial, "Crescent of Embrace," has also been controversial since its inception in 2005; its critics—among them, family members of the Flight 93 dead—immediately petitioned against its implementation due to its crescent shape and orientation (opponents allege that the crescent opens towards Mecca, thus "embracing" not the victims of Flight 93 but a Muslim site of worship), which they viewed as Islamocentric symbols; as a result, they have argued that the memorial could easily be seen by visitors as a celebration of the

September 11 terrorists and their actions. One particularly vocal opponent of the crescent design has been Tom Burnett Sr., whose son Tom Burnett Jr. perished on Flight 93; as a juror on the deciding panel, he argued that the design and its connotations would make a "laughing stock out of [them]" (Ward). Burnett's comments and those made by others strongly in agreement with his anti-crescent stance were then echoed by Congressman Tom Tancredo in a separate statement advocating the bombing of Mecca as retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, which, in turn, sparked a new round of debate and prompted a response from the

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) addressing the Islamophobic bent of the arguments made against the Crescent of Embrace that followed: "[t]he crescent itself has no religious significance in Islam, but is commonly associated with that faith...[opponents to the design] are fabricating a false controversy based on bizarre Internet conspiracy theories" (CAIR). Ultimately, to avoid

100 further argument and, more important, prevent further delays on construction,

memorial designer Paul Murdoch agreed in 2007 to modify the memorial design

and form the basic structure into a circle instead of a crescent after changing the

name to use the word "arc" instead of "crescent" failed to placate critics; notably,

however, the alterations in the topography of the site did not satisfy Tom Burnett

Sr., who has since requested that his dead son's name be excluded from the

memorial altogether ("Flight 93 Memorial Draws a New Round of Criticism").

While construction is still set to begin in late 2009, Murdoch expressed a cautious

outlook regarding the project in a recent interview and divulged only that the

project team was "about to start the technical studies and drawings required for

bidding and construction for the first phase. Meanwhile, [they] are close to

having the funds to construct the first phase and the National Park Service and

Families of Flight 93 are working on several land acquisition challenges...Implementation of future phases is dependent upon available funding" ("Murdoch answers questions about Flight 93 memorial design").

Assuming that the land acquisition issue is resolved in a timely manner, continuing the construction process by the September 11, 2011 deadline would

remain contingent on finding the funds necessary for completion, a problem that

has seen no significant movement since the selection of the winning design plan

in 2005.

Meanwhile, though the noisy contestations around the WTC and

Shanksville memorials continue, one can now visit the Pentagon Memorial in

Washington, D.C., which has been open for memorial business since September

101 11, 2008. The dark horse of the September 11 memorials due to its lesser visibility—with families of the Flight 77 dead referring to it as the "forgotten" site that, as if by some act of karmic compensation, "[has] gone from last to first" in the national consciousness (Stone and Jones, "As Pentagon tribute opens, others years away")— the Pentagon Memorial and the underdog success story that removes it from its 9/11 counterparts invite a closer look at both the process and underlying "political calculus" (Young 217) of its creation. Possibly, it may be its low-profile position compared to the embattled Ground Zero and Shanksville sites that has allowed it to complete its rebuild, but this constructive quietude cannot be dismissed as simply the by-product of media overexposure and divided attention, nor can it be attributed only to the lesser scale of the destructive impact, given the events around Flight 93 (which had far fewer immediate victims—forty victims, compared to the 184 killed when Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon—and caused significantly less structural damage overall). The difference in memorial "tone" and treatment was obvious to journalist David Plotz upon attending the first anniversary of the Pentagon attacks, with the upbeat celebratory scene and emphatic rebuild on location a noticeable departure from the continued sobriety and divisiveness witnessed at the World Trade Center and Flight 93 sites. In his brief comparative analysis,

Plotz suggests that the military subculture that defines the Pentagon community influenced its public mitigation of September 11 losses:

That "Pentagon family" doesn't share its sorrows. That's not military style.

New York is an open, confessional, emotional city. The Pentagon is the

102 opposite. Soldiers don't dwell on their losses in public—their lives and their

work would be impossible if they did. There are too many losses.

New York has an open wound in Lower Manhattan. But the

Pentagon would not show that weakness, certainly would not

commemorate it a year later. This is a building that symbolizes American

victory, so victory it must show. No scar remains. They rebuilt the structure

perfectly, as though 9/11 never happened. ("The Pentagon's Strangely

Festive Ceremony")

The eerily positive atmosphere that Plotz noticed in September 2002 was sustained past the Phoenix Project that put the western face of the Pentagon back together a month early and below budget, and similarly characterized the

Pentagon Memorial's relatively speedy and unchallenged construction. The energetic recovery at the Pentagon could thus be attributed, at least in part, to the "Pentagon family" that Plotz describes, along with its culture of secrecy that would precipitate a hasty and "perfect" rebuild as a protective gesture; however, beyond the confines of the Pentagon enclave, the rapid completion of the

Pentagon Memorial, as a moral exemplum, also teaches to the appropriate dogma about community boundaries needed to re-establish identity post-

September 11 at a national level. So, controlling for the extraneous variables of memorial localities and the habits of the corresponding populations, the primary factor contributing to the successful completion of the Pentagon Memorial ahead of its counterparts is its effective performance of democratic myth as a means of reclaiming nationalist boundaries. Returning now to my earlier comments about

103 the Choose Your Own Adventure approach to teaching, this chapter investigates

the value of its effective treatment in the Pentagon Memorial: unlike the Ground

Zero and Shanksville sites, which have found themselves similarly entangled in

the impossible crisis of designating equal weight to solicited public input and the

final imposition of the educational visions of the memorials and their designers,

the Pentagon Memorial manages to use the first problem as a way to justify the

second, with the resultant situation described by Roland Barthes as the

localization of subversions to "[live] in a balanced economy [where] as in any

sound joint-stock company, the smaller shares—in law but not in fact—

compensate the big ones" (151). As the one standout "success" in the larger

devices of post-9/11 memorialization, the Pentagon Memorial proves a useful

starting point for examining more closely the part that the September 11 tribute

plays in writing public memory through collective instruction; specifically, my aim

in this chapter is to discuss the incorporation of democratic myth (its Orwellian

iterations—that is, as an empty term save for its purifying connotations) into the

paratextual rhetoric of the memorial arena acting on both its architectural and

discursive elements and the relevant persuasive effects that have afforded the

Pentagon Memorial the ability to coerce a rigid and conventional narrative for the

space through the "voluntary" participation of its visitors.

I should mention here that I have yet to take my turn submitting myself to the machinery of remembrance that I claim operates in and around the Pentagon

Memorial; when I last visited the site in early 2003, almost exactly as the winning

design for the memorial had been chosen, the space was still voided; the area

104 around the damaged sections of the Pentagon had been renovated by that time but remained cocooned in a white tarp that also obscured any development happening in the outlying territory. The space sat in its conspicuous and sepulchral blankness as if to invite a resurrecting transformation. I did, however, have a chance to see many of the other well-known memorials populating the vicinity of the nation's capital during that same trip, and after virtualized visitations made possible through a series of online images and corresponding descriptions,

I have been able to notice in my later reflections on the space a calculated continuity of the same blankness that characterized the area before any building had taken place; I assert that this outward emptiness is foundational to the persuasive power of the Pentagon Memorial and stimulates corrective myths by creating deliberate narrative blanks that relevant paratexts must then work to fill.

One explanatory paratext came into play as soon as the Congress authorized then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon to build a national memorial (Gilmore n.p.). In July 2002, the U.S. Army Corps of

Engineers released its guidelines for the Pentagon Memorial design competition and the design competition proper began; the worldwide call for submissions ultimately drew a total of 1126 entries that met all the regulations (American

Forces Press Service). In February 2003, after reviewing the six finalists in the competition, the selection committee (made up of victims' relatives, artists, and two former Defense Secretaries [American Forces Press Service]) had found its winning submission for the Pentagon Memorial, one that "in a very subtle way...tells the story about what happened here" (Wood), and in a manner that

105 answered a need that the original competition statement declared: "to instill the

ideas that patriotism is a moral duty, that freedom comes at a price, and that the

victims of this attack have paid the ultimate price. We challenge [designers] to

create a memorial that translates this terrible tragedy into a place of solace,

peace, and healing" (Washington Post audio tour). At 7:00 in the evening on

September 11, 2008, after seven years of planning and construction and at a

cost of $22 million, the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Virginia became the first completed major national on-site 9/11 memorial to open its doors to the public.

Following three days, September 7-9, of exclusive ticketed access given to family

members of the 184 identified dead (this official number not counting, of course, the five alleged perpetrators) who perished in the September 11 attack, the two- acre patch of sacred ground 200 feet southwest of the Pentagon building had its position in public memorialization formally realized. Just hours prior to the tribute's official opening, President George W. Bush spoke at the memorial's dedication ceremony that morning, where his remarks further expounded on the predestined life of the site as a teachable artefact:

For future generations, this memorial will be a place of learning. The day

will come when most Americans have no living memory of the events of

September the 11th. When they visit this memorial, they will learn that the

21st century began with a great struggle between the forces of freedom

and the forces of terror. They will learn that this generation of Americans

met its duty. We did not tire; we did not falter; and we did not fail. They

will learn that freedom prevailed because the desire for liberty lives in the

106 heart of every man, woman, and child on Earth. (Weekly Compilation of

Presidential Documents 1197)

The thesis framing the Pentagon Memorial as a stage for "teachable moments" is expressly stated in both the original design competition statement and President

Bush's dedication; the founding of the memorial as an object of remembrance wherein "people want to be able to visit—and refresh—their memories" (Sontag

87) is made explicit enough in these declarations, as are the patriotic details of the lessons in which the viewer is trained, which George Mosse presents in his description of the memorial as a corrective testimony:

The role assigned to the fallen...was crucial for their symbolic value. But

the fallen as symbols would have had far less impact if it were not for the

public spaces and memorials which bore witness to their deeds and their

heritage. The purpose which the fallen were made to serve was given true

meaning when their resting places became shrines of national worship

and when monuments erected in their honor became the focus of the

public's attention. The fallen were transformed into symbols which people

could see and touch and which made their cult come alive. (80)

What is left yet unexplained, however, is the more technical how? of the project, specifically, How does the Pentagon Memorial succeed as an artefact for teaching the individual viewer the collective (official) memory of September 11, and against what oppositional elements is it teaching this version of events?

The necessity of asking these questions about the Pentagon Memorial in particular emerges from the circumstances of its time and place; in more

107 traditional memorial arrangements, such as cenotaphs and statues, what was to

be remembered and how content was to be remembered were unambiguously attached, so that in examining the development of national tributes, "[t]he conservatism of the cult of the fallen needs to be emphasized...[for] whenever modern or experimental forms were suggested or even built, they aroused a storm of opposition and proved ineffective" (Mosse 103). Again, for the

Pentagon Memorial to be touted by its proponents as "a place like no other" and a Zen-like, modernist site that promises not to interfere with personal reflection while it adheres, as "advertised," to recreating a certain narrative equilibrium that the symbolic violence of the September 11 attacks grossly disrupted at a national level, its engagement with its viewers must subscribe to what Young cites as "the fascist tendencies in all monuments6" (130), even as it publicly gestures to the contrary.

As the post-9/11 memorial, like any memorial, is intended to "inform the visitor's moral imagination" (Linenthal 139) by determining the contextual and cultural scripts through which the public views and subsequently remembers events, it participates in producing the conditions for public memorialization.

Through explicit conditions as well as the "undeclared regulations implicit in any memorial installation that necessarily govern our experiences in their spaces," the commemorative site serves its visitors the terms of its use, so that

6 Throughout At Memory's Edge, a book that deals exclusively with the problems associated with memorializing the Holocaust, Young expresses a wariness of the regulations at work in or otherwise encouraged by commemoration, both declared and undeclared, that in his view control the viewers' interpretation in a way that is inflexible and "fascist." 108 what we finally 'learn' from such museums may be less about memory

than how to comport ourselves in its vicinity. We learn both the rules of

the memorial and the facts of history, but in tandem, and in ways that

mutually shape each other...we cannot know this history outside of the

ways it is shaped for us in the museum...our experience in the museum

shapes the history we've come to remember, so that we may never

mistake one for the other, even as we cannot know one outside of the

other. (Young 124)

The interplay between the memorial's rules and the visitor's experiences appears more complicated when, as in the case of the Pentagon Memorial, there is an outward insistence upon the deregulation of memory and the individual freedom on the part of the viewer to interpret content as he or she chooses—even as the tribute site, by definition, engages in the administration of memory. There is an inertia, I would argue, about commemoration, its glorified treatment of the dead, that if "understood as obscuring a host of concerns and anxieties about public order and public morale that cannot be named, as well as pointing to the inability otherwise to formulate or defend traditional conventions of how to mourn"

(Sontag 69), cannot be disposed of, only concealed.

When presented with questions about the meanings and usages of the

Pentagon Memorial, designers Keith Kaseman and Julie Beckman [who technically cannot be referred to as architects because they never completed their practica—this is a seemingly trivial detail whose significance will become clearer in my later discussion of the couple and their work closer to the

109 conclusion of this chapter] have consistently emphasized the open-ended nature

of the memorial's structural elements and, consequently, its "architectural

narrative":

Because the events of September 11 represented an attack on free

thought, the memorial is inspired by values opposed to extremism and

intolerance. Its lack of signs and rigid symbolism is an affirmation of

democratic ideals.

We wanted to invite people to think but not tell them how to think or

what to feel. The memorial gives you enough of a story to set you on your

own process of discovery and interpretation. (Kaseman qtd. in Miroff)

This design philosophy would be echoed by Jim Laychak, President of the

Pentagon Memorial Fund, in his assertion that "We [the selection committee] wanted a place that would make people think but not tell them what to think"

("Pentagon Memorial")7, and much of the logistical organization around the use of the space pairs accessibility with fluidity as guiding principles: the Pentagon

Memorial is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; it has free admission (it hopes to raise the $10 million it needs for maintenance through fundraising and donations alone); and tourists, upon arriving at the tribute, "won't find any brochures or interpretive guides to explain the memorial or its symbolism" (Miroff). Furthermore, Kaseman and Beckman's memorial, with its design emphasis on natural elements—water, trees—gestures at a meditative,

7 The Pentagon Memorial's "philosophy of space" has frequently been reiterated by Kaseman and Beckman and the Pentagon Memorial Fund (particularly Laychak) in interviews and related literature, a seeming excess in explanation that suggests the following of a script (which, of course, presents related problems regarding what isn't being said—that is, what a script, if it indeed exists, would be positioned to speak over). 110 "universal" emotive response on the part of the viewer; specifically, the non-literal

incorporation of some of these pieces in the overall work (for instance, the fact that they did not assign one tree per victim, as in the Shanksville Flight 93

memorial's proposed design, but arbitrarily chose to use eighty trees) is juxtaposed against its inclusion of literal, ordinal references, such as the

orientation of the space around the flight path of the doomed Flight 77 or the 184

cantilevering benches representing the victims. All these "freer" characteristics of the Pentagon Memorial gel with the mission statement posted online by

Washington Headquarters Services (WHS), the organization in charge of operating and maintaining the memorial:

The Pentagon Memorial is designed so that the nation may remember and

reflect on the events that occurred on September 11, 2001. The Memorial

will be free and open to the public seven days a week. Groups and

individuals are welcome in the Memorial each day but guided tours are not

offered; the Memorial is meant to be experienced on a more personal

level. (WHS Home page, my italics)

Naturally, however, it is also obvious that despite the efforts made by the designers in the articulation of the memorial to be open, the fact remains that the

Pentagon Memorial is not simply a park or patch of urban green space; first, the explicit and extensive list of site regulations served to prospective visitors makes it unmistakably clear that the space demands a certain protocol to be observed.

This information features prominently on the U.S. Department of Defense

Pentagon Memorial website

111 (http://www.defenselink.mil/home/features/2008/0708 memorial/family.html); specifically, it is on the "Memorial Visitors" page meant to "greet" perspective viewers where the majority of the information offered to guests refers to the site's rules. After the first line on the page explains that "[t]here are no scheduled official tours of the Pentagon Memorial [because] The Memorial is meant to be experienced by each visitor," the sprawling rules that follow then stipulate how one may not experience the Memorial. Besides the obligatory mention on the page about "Important Information Regarding Conduct," which gives an abbreviated list of unacceptable activities, another, lengthier section on the rules of use for the Pentagon Reservation (which are also directly applicable to the

Memorial) is relegated to a separate file of "Part 234—Conduct on the Pentagon

Reservation" and includes no fewer than sixteen restricted acts ranging from

"Compliance with official signs" (234.5) to "Alcoholic beverages and controlled substances" (234.11) to "Gambling" (234.16); also discussed in the section are the "Penalties and effect on other laws":

(a) Whoever shall be found guilty of willfully violating any rule or

regulation enumerated in this part is subject to the penalties imposed by

Federal law for the commission of a Class B misdemeanour offense.

(b) Whoever violates any rule or regulation enumerated in this

part is liable to the United States for a civil penalty of no more than $1,000.

(c) Nothing in this part shall be construed to abrogate any other

Federal laws. (234.19)

112 Interestingly, this list is accessed in its entirety when one hits the hypertexted

"Click here for full information on approved conduct" (my italics) while the section, without exception, refers only to banned activities. Always evident is the working contradiction between the statements welcoming the guest to experience the site but then, as in the list of rules and regulations, the placement of firm parameters—"fixed paths"—on the experience itself.

It would be simple enough to dismiss the debriefing of prohibited activities as necessary to the upkeep and preservation of the Pentagon Reservation as a whole, but the section that follows on the same page as the aforementioned guidelines, the one addressed directly to "Family Members," hints at regulations that manage more than just the practical groundskeeping measures and ultimately opens onto the more impactful limits on personal interpretation and expression in memory. Mementos, the basis of spontaneous memorials, emerge as a priority target for these regulations. Beginning with the observation that

"[f]rom time to time, it is expected that individuals or groups may leave personal mementos at the Memorial Park," the text moves immediately to the declaration,

"these mementos will be handled as follows," which is then succeeded by a basic description of the "processing" of on-site mementos:

A. At the end of normal hours of operation, (8 pm EST or 10 pm

EDST), the organization that is responsible for the maintenance of the

Pentagon Memorial Park will collect all items left inside the Pentagon

Memorial Park. Perishable items (such as flowers) will be discreetly

discarded at a location outside the Pentagon Memorial Park site. Non-

113 perishable items will be collected and cataloged (item description,

date collected, location of collection, etc.) and stored for 30 days.

B. After 30 days, the organization responsible for maintenance

of the Pentagon Memorial Park will provide a list of all items collected

during the past 30 day to the Pentagon Building Management Office

(PBMO). The Government and the Pentagon Memorial Fund (PMF)

will review that list. The PMF will take possession of items they feel

individual families might be interested in receiving and send those

items to the specific family as appropriate. The PBMO and Pentagon

Building Manager (PBM) will take possession of any remaining items

that they would like to preserve within 30 days of being provided the

list. All items not requested by the PBMO or the PMF will be discreetly

disposed of by the organization responsible for the maintenance of the

Pentagon Memorial Park in a manner acceptable to the PBMO.

(http://www.defenselink.mil/home/features/2008/0708 memorial/family

.html)

Again, most of these rules would seem more reasonable were it not for the previous mention of individualized, personal mourning at the site; furthermore, if the summative object of these parameters were simply the wholesale disposal of all left paraphernalia at the site, the operation of these limits could still be understood more simply as a mandatory housekeeping order. However, within the exactitude of the regulatory framework—the fact that the mementos are being picked over for their "meaning" to the PBMO—

114 the limitations of the personal memorial experience appear clearer still.

Yes, the Memorial is open 24/7, but there are the normal hours of operation, during which the regulations become "activated." And, yes, it adds,

mementos are sometimes permitted, but when they are left behind, the

Memorial staff collects and reviews those items, and shortly after, evaluates those objects according to its (unstated) criteria; the Pentagon Memorial

Fund makes its final picks to determine what items should be returned to the contributing families, and the remainder is left for the Pentagon Building

Management Office (PBMO) either to preserve or dispose of at its discretion. We may note, too, that only after these conditions are established are the families even brought into the discussion:

Family members are welcome to bring a memento to the Pentagon

Memorial Park on the family preview dates (September 7th, 8th and

9th), place it at the bench site, take photographs etc., but we ask that

you take the memento with you. The Pentagon Memorial Park will

need to be swept for security purposes before the dedication on

September 11th and no items may be left in the park between the last

family preview date (September 9th) and the dedication date on

September 11th.

On September 11th, after the dedication ceremony, if you bring

a memento, and once you have gone through security, you may place

the memento at the bench site, take photographs etc. If you do not

take the memento with you after you leave the Pentagon Memorial

115 Park at the end of the dedication ceremony, then, the procedures

described in A and B above will apply.

(http://www.defenselink.mil/home/features/2008/0708 memorial/family

.html)

Significantly, the text shifts at this moment from the descriptive to the imperative: You [family members] are to observe the following restrictions; the rules are not merely stated but directed at the visitor. Thereafter, no further explication is offered on this page regarding the PBMO's management of families' mementos or its mysterious selection program, but an analogous historiographic exercise is described in Linenthal's account of the collection of artefacts for the United States Holocaust Museum that illuminates the administrative context for these omissions:

They [the members of the exhibit team] were uncomfortable...with the

nature of the artifacts [they] had obtained. As a result of a worldwide

plea in 1988 calling for donations of "documents, letters, diaries,

original works of art, articles of clothing, photographs and other

objects that were created in the camps, in ghettos or in hiding," over

ten thousand items—called "object survivors" by the curatorial staff-

were donated to the museum....The collection did not impress

Applebaum [the exhibit designer], who characterized it as "the

contents of what survivors brought out in their pockets," or Smith

[director of the exhibition], who called the collection "pitiful and tragic.

To [his] eyes there were fewer than a dozen tiny artifacts worth

116 displaying and a photographic collection that seemed a motley of

happenstance and cast offs. Yet it was vouchsafed as the basis for a

major national exhibit." (146)

In the incident described by the US Holocaust Museum design team and in

the case of personal mementos addressed by the PBMO, the starting

problem of memorial collection lies not in acquisition but in discrimination:

that is, the real memorial project begins with selecting from the public

offerings the objects most suitably aligned with a memorial's narrative, both it

and the act of choosing mementos borrowing from the same set of

hierarchical mythic suppositions that determine the course of official memory.

The endorsement of public participation does not translate, in this case, into an acceptance of the individual expression of grief within the conceptualization of official tribute, at least not in an unaffiliated form; once more, the thorough domestication of personal grief is required for its contribution to the presentable conversations of "civic memory":

The dominant memory emerges after a struggle between conflicting

interpretations of historical events and comes to act as a bulwark for

the establishment. The past becomes an excuse for the present,

justifying the social or political order on the grounds that it was

ordained by history. The dominant memory claims that the status quo

exists because the past wills it. In doing so, it sets out what should be

remembered (as well as how it should be remembered) and what

should be forgotten. Individuals who do not subscribe to the dominant

117 memory, who refuse to forget or remember what it prescribes,

become subversives. Their private memories are driven underground,

to exist as a potentially threatening undercurrent to the social order.

(Vance 9)

When the past becomes an excuse for the present, a "community service" outlook on public participation becomes an excuse for that excuse, namely

how the recollection of the past is finally explained as a polyvocal group project. The invitation to submit a family memento to external, institutional review is but one manifestation of this self-justifying excuse for the writing of a "usable past."

Relevant to the management of mementos on-site is the Pentagon

Memorial's connection to the StoryCorps project undertaken in partnership with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade

Center. Appearing on the same "Family Members" page is an invitation to participate in this memorial initiative, "one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, to collect a remembrance for each of the lives lost in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 ...[to be] deposited at the Library of Congress

[and] preserved in perpetuity as a part of the Memorial Museum's permanent collection." Interested parties were to schedule an interview to be conducted at the Memorial itself on September 8-9, 2008, days that limited access to family members only (a sample bias that tightens the direction of the storytelling—that is, the people assumed to be most affected by the loss and whose emotive narration would, consequently, be decorously confined); as

118 "spaces [were] limited" for the one-hour sessions, participants were encouraged to book early, to prepare to meet "the identification requirements that [would] be needed by Pentagon security," and, if possible, to peruse the

"suggested interview questions" prior to the meeting. The StoryCorps questions come arranged in sets for general use, for survivors, and for

"Rescue Workers, First Responders, and Volunteers"

(http://www.storvcorps.net/initiatives/september-11th/question-list). In addition to these lists is the prompt, "We encourage you to come up with your own questions, too"; no examples of this final set are provided, but reference to "edited segments," the standing StoryCorps archival categories

(among these themes, "Angels and Mentors," "Friendship," and "Romance" are listed items), and the sixteen featured September 11 stories

(http://www.storvcorps.org/listen/stories/categorv/september-11) trace out the ideological limits of the memorial stories that StoryCorps represents in its collection, what Nancy Miller labels "the ethics of mourning," defined by

giving formal dimensions to suffering [to] create a coherent public

persona to fit the event and one that also serves to protect both the

victim and the mourners from the display of excessive or unsuitable

emotions. [These] take the private person into the public arena within

recognizable conventions... (118)

At the time of this writing, none of the stories taken from the Pentagon visit have been added yet to the collection; however, a brief examination of the

September 11 stories currently available offers a glimpse of the expectations

119 implied within the StoryCorps framework to meet the requirements of the ethics of mourning that Miller observes. One story, tagged "When I met

Michael I was 14 years old," features Monique Ferrer, the ex-wife of Michael

Trinidad, who was killed in the World Trade Center; Ferrer makes several passing references to her divorce from Trinidad in her story, but these are easily massaged back into her story about her long relationship with her

"best friend" and former spouse:

When I met Michael, I was fourteen years old, and I knew that he was

going to be my boyfriend [laughs]. We got married when I was

nineteen, and we were both kids; we really didn't know what next, you

know, get married and now what?

When we were divorced, I remember the kids telling me that

their father confided in them with a secret, and they didn't want to tell

me, and I'm, like, well, what's the secret? And they said, "Well, Daddy

still loves you."

A pronounced "fast-forward" in the account streamlines the connection between the meeting of the lovers and their amicable parting, punctuated by the children attesting their father's lasting love for their mother; the difficulties leading up to the divorce are glossed over as insignificant to Trinidad's story, as are the details of Ferrer's second marriage (notably, Ferrer refers to Trinidad as her husband and not her ex at least once in the short recording), and the story ends with

Ferrer asserting again that "as much as [Trinidad] used to drive [her] crazy, he was [her] family and [her] best friend." In this story, even the necessarily

120 complicated relationship between a divorced couple, their children, and the new

spouse is moulded to fit the tidy boundaries of the ethics of mourning and act on the familiar "narrative DNA" that "opens the lock of identity, if only you supply the

right reference sample" (Miller 116). The right reference sample is really all that the donor of a biography can give to StoryCorps, and all the latter is interested in extracting from its exercise; the diversity of its collection is artificial, and the thousands of stories that it has so far collected, as well as the thousands that it aspires to collect in coming years "to [celebrate] our shared humanity" and

"create a kinder, more thoughtful and compassionate nation" (StoryCorps mission statement) is the consequence of replicating the same narrative DNA, the same

"safe" and subtly narcissistic themes. Slavoj Zizek recounts a similarly tethered narrative experience writing biographical notes for his book jacket: encouraged to include telling anecdotal details about his pastimes, he toyed with the idea of inserting comments about his penchant (fictional, one would assume) for child pornography and the lessons he gives his young son about how to pull the wings off flies. His suggested content is preposterous, but the oppression to which it alludes is irrefutable: the invitation to share a personal story comes with unstated orders to be met in the telling.

The memorial's physical design and its individual elements—the Zero

Line, age lines, and age wall; the 184 victim benches (memorial units) and perimeter bench; and the natural elements of water, gravel, and greenery— continue the intercourse between narratives of collectivity and individuality, and of polyphony and univocality, as these operate within the regulated space of the

121 memorial. When asked by Washington Post about the inspiration for their project

design, Julie Beckman described the motivation behind the work as a way for her

and Keith Kaseman, her partner, to do their part, that "this [the design

competition] came up, and it really seemed, given what we do, you know, for a

living and what-not, that this was an opportunity for us to give back, even in a

very, kind of quiet, subtle way, you know, just to contribute to a conversation"

(Memorial Audio Tour, "Memorial Gateway"). The cooperative spirit that sparked

their work in their entry is similarly referenced by Kaseman, who, in the same

interview, followed up with his impression of the design competition and its

expectations:

And the thing that really pulled us into the competition was the

statement that the family members put together just calling for a place

that would invite people to think but not tell them what to think or how

to feel. We could tell by their message and the way that the website

was put together that there's a group of people really trying to do

something the right way, and it really clicked with us right off the bat.

("Memorial Gateway")

The somewhat self-negating tone of both statements is perhaps a required

modesty, given the nature of the competition and the decorous aspects of

memorial discourse already noted, but past the understated treatment of the designers towards their work there is also a downplaying of the power wielded by these quietly "democratizing" influences, their expression in the details of the

memorial, and, as determined by both of these agents, the transformative

122 experience in the visitor that sees the "conversation" one is brought into by the memorial become instead a monologue to be absorbed. Again, while post-

September 11 memorial discourse has placed solid emphasis upon the dialogic nature of its engagements, closer inspection of the Pentagon Memorial's design reveals its fidelity to a mode of persuasion that uses the purifying connotations of democracy to snuff out any disagreement, a case wherein the definition of democracy is altered, such that "Democracy—in the way this term is used today—concerns, above all, formal legalism: its minimal definition is unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are absorbed into the agonistic game" (Zizek

264).

Illustrating the fixed narrative of the democratic journey towards healing that the Pentagon Memorial represents, the benches, as a central fixture in the piece, are the key players. Tellingly, the benches are divided into the continuous perimeter bench incorporated into the "age wall" alongside the westernmost edge of the site and the cantilevered benches that figure prominently into the memorial units, with the latter very infrequently mentioned as furniture. The perimeter bench was an afterthought, the designers explained, "added for visitors to rest on if they were uncomfortable sitting on the memorial benches" (Memorial Audio Tour.

"The Youngest Victims"). The benches-as-memorial units, however, were the starting point for Beckman and Kaseman's plan for the memorial site; as an object that met their practical and aesthetic design criteria—a place to sit

123 "for ten minutes or two to three hours—or as long as you like," a piece that could work with a reflecting pool of water built in, and a symbol that joined

individual and collective loss—it would be among "the first hints that

[Kaseman and Beckman] layered into the memorial design" (Architects of

Memories, part one, my emphasis). Empty seats, as "tangible expressions of emptiness [that] have long been part of the commemorative vocabulary"

(Vance, note to the author) have found their way into other memorials before and since the Pentagon Memorial, but a notable (and for the purposes of my discussion here a comparable implementation of this symbolic object) can be seen in the Oklahoma City National Memorial, in which the 168 empty chairs representing the victims of the Murrah Building bombing were

one of [the] most powerful "selling points"...[described by designer

Hans Butzer as] a "very simple yet powerful portrayal of someone not

being there. The image of 168 empty chairs clustered on the grassy

slope...seemed so quietly overwhelming....Like an empty chair at a

dinner table, we were always aware of the presence of a loved one's

absence"...[and, according to the evaluation committee] "individually

human scaled, while collectively monumental." (Linenthal 218-220,

Butzer's quotations)

The role of the bench in the Pentagon Memorial went beyond even this fundamental symbolic role of the "presence of absence" that Edward

Linenthal describes as the key component of the Oklahoma City memorial site; the empty seat would become itself a character, one whose life-story

124 would be a spinoff from that of the memorial itself. In three short video

pieces included in its Sacred Ground series covering the rebuilding efforts at the Pentagon, the Washington Post traces for the viewer the bildungsroman

of the benches, from their "birth" in a Missouri foundry to their "graduation"

polishing in Chicago and, finally, to their final installation on-site in

Washington. The first phase of A Bench's Journey, "Emotional Scene as

Final Memorial Benches Take Form," establishes the personalized meaning of each bench: the film opens with Jerry Markham, president of MetalTek

(the company that runs the Missouri foundry that moulded the benches), discussing the emotional dimension to the work that his employees completed, how being involved in casting the benches was "very much a personal thing for [them]." Following this opening, Jim Laychak (president of the Pentagon Memorial Fund) builds another narrative layer onto the genealogy of the benches by describing his reaction to seeing the final two units being poured: these were, he explains, the benches that would be laid for Dana and Zoe Falkenberg to reunite the two young sisters in remembrance. Other voices join in to add their impressions of the benches, each contributing to the ascending humanization of the memorial objects; by the time Markham returns towards the end of the video to describe how the completion of the benches was "bittersweet" and felt like "losing a friend

[or]...a family member," the hypallagic manipulation is complete, and the benches are ready agents animated to "do their part."

125 Once the first clip establishes the living qualities of the benches, the epic of the units' relationships with those involved in bringing them to the memorial takes on an increasingly sentimental quality. When the benches continue their journey to Chicago in the second segment, "Applying the

Finishing Touches," the viewer witnesses the polishing and passivation

(cleaning) process, but more important is the background explanation provided by Abe Yousif, owner of Bucthal Metal Finishing Corporation. While the process of finishing the stainless steel frames of the benches is traced step by step in the video, Yousif s narrative begins with his emigration from

Iraq to America; a related article, "Helping 9/11 Healing, Illinois Workers Craft

Pentagon Memorial Components," further explains how Yousif, who came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1979, would finally live out the American Dream and find himself in a position to contribute to the community of mourning post-

9/1 1, of which he was a part:

"Being an Arab American, you feel so sorry," Yousif said, sitting in his

small office adjacent to the shop, a dim, cavernous warehouse next to a

soap factory. Airplanes landing nearby at O'Hare International Airport

roared overhead every few minutes, adding to the din of the grinding

machines. "It's a feeling like you can contribute something good to this

horrible thing if you can make [the benches] look beautiful."

For Yousif and his employees, the project is a chance to create

something permanent in the heart of an adopted country. But it is also a

reminder of how they got here, and of places and people left behind.

126 The film only hints at what the article explains: the long individual ordeals faced by Yousif and his employees, all of whom, it turns out, are immigrants.

Nevertheless, the primacy of Yousif s story and his declarations about his emotional investment in his work (that it makes him "happy") in the video situate the process shown taking place: it is to be understood as a community experience, one that ossifies the "American-ness" of the immigrant workers as they demonstrate their commitment to the memorial project; clearly, it doesn't matter where they came from or what they did before this moment as they are now part of the memorial community—the only community that counts. In a similar vein, the final instalment in the series, "The End of a Bench's Journey" captures the community spirit that informs all aspects of bench construction, no matter how mundane, and the story of the bench finally becomes the story of its

"team." Jean Barnak, the project manager of the Pentagon Memorial offers a detailed account of how painstaking the work of shipping and installing the benches is, due to the handmade, individual nature of each unit. All the dropping, shifting, and scraping shown in the film is made ceremonious by

Barnak's clearly exasperated explication of the weight of the units (600-700 pounds), the requirement of an elaborate gantry system for careful transport, and

"slight variations" in the topcasts that make it necessary to have a "master mason" individually modify each of the five granite pieces built into each of the

184 benches. As these details are covered at length by Bartak, scenes of industrious work crews completing the various tasks appear in montage; collectively their contributions illustrate the value ascribed to the benches, and as

127 before, the benches are presented as the touchstone of community spirit post-

September 11. After this "careful, loving, long process" (Bartak in "The End," her emphasis) comes to an end, the benches take their place in the memorial neither as furniture nor as mere symbols; they instead arrive as citizens of the memorial community in their own right, complete with a life story.

Predictably, the benches' creation stories segue into the overarching story of the Memorial, which is told through the design cues and more straightforwardly through explication of the design. The cantilevered benches are wing-like in form, recalling the flight reference in the design of the Staten Island "Postcards"

9/11 Memorial and serving also as a literal nod to Flight 77; the benches' orientation also divide those who died on the plane from those killed in the building, so that a Flight 77 victim's name read straight on will have the sky in the background and a Pentagon fatality will have the Pentagon as a backdrop (while the units of those who died in the Pentagon are to be seen with the western wall of the Pentagon behind them). To contextualize the memorial further as a democratic fixture, though, the benches also interact with both the age wall and age lines furnishing the site; the age wall "grows" alongside the memorial, so that as one enters at the gates and walks through the space, the wall extends vertically to correspond with the advancing ages of the dead. The benches are also affixed in an ordinal setup, so that each the parallel rows are assigned to consecutive years, starting with the birth year of the youngest victim (1998) and ending with that of the oldest (1930); all of these are oriented to line up parallel with the trajectory of Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. Finally, upon

128 exiting the Memorial, the visitor passes Zero Line, which was created out of a piece of charred limestone recovered from the original damaged wall of the

Pentagon. All of these design details are recounted for the curious visitor by the already-mentioned audio tour made available through Washington Post (Part

Two: "The Youngest Victims"); taken together, they communicate the designers' stated intention "to use [design] details...to memorialize the differences, yet similarities, among the victims" ("The Youngest Victims"). The use of wing-forms and celestial details, the prominent and repeated inclusion of victim names, and, perhaps more revealingly, the stubborn omission of any reference to the perpetrators, speak to the hagiographic purpose of the commemorative space.

The audio tour guide explicitly completes the connection between educational theme and object—the show and the tell—by offering the guest complete instructions for interpreting the memorial units and, in one moment of its characteristic overexplanation, doing so using the unit assigned to Dana

Falkenberg, the youngest among the "Youngest Victims" intimated by the title of the second tour chapter:

If you look below Dana's nameplate into the pool of water, you'll see the

names Leslie Wittington, Charles Falkenberg, and Zoe Falkenberg.

On September 11, 2001, Dana was headed to Australia with Leslie,

Charles, and Zoe, all of whom died with her when Flight 77 crashed into

the Pentagon: an entire family wiped out in an instant.

129 Dana, like most three-year-old little girls, was fascinated by

anything about princesses and stayed in costume much of the time,

according to the girl's Nana.

She lived with her parents Charles and Leslie in University Park,

Maryland, with her sister Zoe. Leslie, an associate professor of Public

Policy at Georgetown University, was to be a visiting fellow at the

Australian National University in Canberra. ("Youngest Victims")

By centering the instructions on the unit belonging to a child victim, the tour unambiguously taps into an essential (maybe even instinctual) association between young children and innocence; by focusing on the three-year-old Dana and sharing the minute details of her life, one's interaction with her bench is transformed into a larger metaphysical statement about the loss of innocence that the national community experienced on September 11 and is now responsible for rebuilding. Understanding where Dana fits into the tragic story of the Flight 77 crash reinforces an inescapable tone for understanding the "big picture" of the event; consequently, it is not accidental that the gate to the memorial opens onto the benches of the youngest victims first to establish the proper tenor for the remainder of the visit, the tragic note that acts to colour the entirety of the visitor's experience.

The democratic requirement of the naming of names is not limited, however, to the roll call of the memorial struck in opposition to the anonymity of mass death. The community of the Pentagon Memorial is a community of first names whose extension can be read in the narrative treatment of the designers,

130 Keith Kaseman and Julie Beckman; this personal touch is novel enough to warrant further analysis here, as are the strangely trivial biographical details worked into the discourse around their involvement in creating the Pentagon

Memorial. Unlike the competitions for the Ground Zero rebuild, which ended with the appointment of "celebrity" architects and firmly established firms (Daniel

Libeskind, David Childs, SOM in the case of the WTC, and Paul Murdoch

Architects for Flight 93), the final choice for the Pentagon Memorial turned out to be an experimental submission by Kaseman and Beckman, who at the time were industry unknowns, just two students who were engaged to each other, living in and working out of a studio apartment in New York. The story of their success, in its many official tellings, repeatedly highlights the unlikelihood of the couple's selection, but to me, they collectively exhibit why Kaseman and Beckman are, for so many reasons, the perfect choice of faces to put on the project. Their authorship of the memorial would be framed by what they could bring to the democratic arch-narrative of the project as a whole, with their wholesome and downright twee Everyman story. The Washington Post article "Creating a Place

Like No Other" introduces the down-to-earth pair:

Kaseman and Beckman were a young couple barely out of graduate

school in 2002 when they made the rough sketches of what would

become the nation's first major September 11th memorial. Their lone

architectural collaboration to that point had been a loft bed, which let them

cram their desks and computers into their apartment's shoebox-like

confines.

131 Their imaginations, though, had moved on to bigger things. The

still-raw images and emotions of Sept. 11, 2001, that had hung over the

city and their lives since they watched the towers fall. A Web site they had

seen about a worldwide design competition for a memorial at the

Pentagon, one that would consider any entry and judge blindly,

unconcerned with famous names or industry status.

It seemed like a way out, at least for them and maybe for others,

too, from under a pall. (Miroff)

From there on in, every reference to Kaseman and Beckman, who married in

2004 while working on the Pentagon Memorial project, feeds in some conspicuous way to their humble beginnings and their long-shot success story: the last two letters in the acronym for their made-up company name KBAS referring to the Amsterdam Studio they shared, the Italian restaurant down the street where they started the project, their trip to Belize. The details would help reinvent Kaseman and Beckman as "Keith-'n-Julie," a portmanteau bestowed upon them as they worked on the project, one that aptly describes their place within the mythology of the Pentagon Memorial community as it rebuilt: "'More importantly,' [Beckman] said, 'the families put faith in us right away.' When family members from the Pentagon Memorial Fund, which has sponsored the project, needed to be consulted on some aspect of its construction, they often deferred to the designers, asking, 'What do Keith-n-Julie want to do?'" (Miroff n.p.). The fact that they were "just like everyone else" would paradoxically be the clear advantage that would be missing from a celebrity architect's arsenal: like

132 dependable, big-hearted neighbours, Keith and Julie were there with the

"common folk," and their ordinariness would win the trust of those involved in

memorial decision making, to the point where jurors would defer to the couple's judgment without hesitation. Also greasing the proverbial wheels of the working

relationship was the fact that Keith and Julie are a cute couple, attractive, but

with an "aw-shucks" sensibility about them and a surprised view of their own

celebrity that keeps them relatable despite the exceptionality of their situation.

Banality is celebrated, with Keith-n-Julie's story reinforcing the democratic ideal

(myth) that anyone can succeed spectacularly despite being "the little guy"— without making it too evident that in the right situations, one must be the little guy,

strategically, to find advancement in the fashion of "Operation Margarine" that

Barthes defines:

To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its

drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible way

of exulting it. Here is the pattern of this new-style demonstration: take the

established value which you want to restore or develop, and first lavishly

display its pettiness, the injustices that it produces, the vexations to which

it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last

moment, save it in spite of, or rather by the heavy curse of its blemishes.

(41)

By Barthes's logic, the fact that Keith and Julie "can't even use the word architects in the title of their firm because they never finished their formal internships" should make them less competitive in their chosen field, but by the

133 virtue of memorial discourse, their lack of educational accreditation harmonizes with the myth of democracy (another instance of the democracy of craftsmanship, discussed in Chapter Two, which emerges out of collective mourning). Having safely passed their initiation into the democracy of craftsmanship, Keith-'n-Julie have served as the "people's choice architects," and are currently moving on to planning their next memorial project in Texas, which will commemorate the space shuttle Columbia accident February 1, 2003.

Moving now towards the conclusion of this chapter and its analytical meanderings, I feel a need to return to the central contradiction that gives meaning to all the others I see at work within the Pentagon Memorial: as a space intended for uninterrupted personal interpretation and expression of the experience of September 11, it offers no opportunity for either. Instead, it functions as a venue for education in the "correct" values tied to the commemoration of September 11, and the intelligence of its collective instruction project (which Susan Sontag, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, refers to as the true nature of any memorial undertaking) lies in its covert operation: outwardly, everything about the Pentagon Memorial feels "micro"—its small project dimensions, simple design, and mom-and-pop design team—and, consequently, freshly democratic and vague, even while its "macro" definitions and conditions— its rules of use—remain fixed and immovable. Whereas certain

"countermonument" installations, such as the disappearing Harburg Monument

Against Fascism and for Peace designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-

Gerz, embrace the concept of individual interaction at sites (the Harberg design

134 "self-effaces" by encouraging "vandalism" on the part of the visitor and then by disappearing gradually into the ground) as a defining gesture to "[challenge] the monument's traditional illusions of permanence, its authoritarian rigidity" (Young

128), the Pentagon Memorial's appeal to personal experience is strategic, brought into its operating logic as a refined form of censorship to couch the expression of its fundamentally authoritarian principles and dynamics.

A final testament to the Pentagon Memorial's placement in the "natural order" of collective memory and the enforced regulations that the space consciously and vaingloriously speaks against can be found in the overriding

"sacred cow" sensibility of the project and its origins that makes it difficult to voice any disapproval of the design, its message, or its creators. My interest was, nevertheless, piqued by one notable critique of Kaseman and Beckman's memorial design and of the Pentagon competition in general. The dissenting reviews by architectural critic Catesby Leigh reflect his own traditionalist inclinations, but his complaints about the Pentagon Memorial's

"meaninglessness" becomes, at times, accidentally revealing in its location of problems within the outwardly democratic discourse of post-9/11 commemoration:

Apart from the curious sculptural gesture of the memorial units, the

memorial design boils down to factoids: The victims' dates of birth, and

where they were at the time of the crash, plus the flight path. This

conforms to the documentary, "value-neutral" tenets of postmodern

memorial design. The memorial units - dubbed "light benches" before

135 assuming their bureaucratic appellation - are variations on the 168 chairs

at the Oklahoma City Memorial, where the chairs are arranged in rows

corresponding to the number of victims on each floor of the Murrah

Federal Building. ("The Unbearable Lightness of the Pentagon Memorial,"

n.p.)

Here, Leigh's primary source of frustration is what he sees as the "tyranny" of

Modernist design brought about by strategically placed members of the

"reductive, conceptualist ilk" whose abstract notions about therapeutic memorialization constitute a "suppression] of any expression of civic idealism, let alone spiritual destiny." In the case of the Pentagon selection committee, he observes an aesthetic bias that, for him, challenges the adopted "democratic" mission statement:

Design professionals—"public artists," architects, and landscape

architects, all of them modernist—constituted a majority on the panel of 11

competition jurors and one alternate....The classical tradition, representing

thousands of years of accumulated design knowledge, shaped the great

monumental vistas in and around Washington. But its exponents had no

voice on the jury.

With Modernist memorials amounting to little more than a fad in his estimation,

Leigh sees the shutting-out of classical memorial designs (such as cenotaphs and statues) as a symptom of the cronyism and fashion-victim mentality at work within the architectural community, with the end result being a strongly biased, uniform sample of finalists taken from the original 1126 submissions that

136 continues "the dehumanization of architecture that resulted from the human body's displacement by the machine as the point of departure for design" ("Back to you, Corb" n.p.). Leigh summarizes his assessment of the Pentagon Memorial by pointing out what it shares as a common weakness with all contemporary memorials, which is the lack of a clear memorial message, one that captures the human touch in the way he sees traditional pieces doing:

[A] cenotaph speaks not only to the lives lost on September 11, but to our

republic's sustenance in times of trial by high ideals. And it's precisely the

artistic embodiment of such idealism, employing fine materials and a

humanist idiom everybody understands at an instinctive level, that would

allow [the] Pentagon Memorial to stand for the ages.

In contrast, meaning is not intrinsic to the Beckman-Kaseman

design, but rather amounts to whatever significance the visitor might

happen to pin on it. ("Unbearable Lightness")

In his case against the characteristic "inhumanity" of the Pentagon Memorial's modernist design and its attendant lack of meaning, Leigh correctly identifies an aesthetic vacuum but disappointingly overlooks entirely an accompanying ideological nullity that this constructed meaninglessness designates, in short, its value in commemorative education and its role in the "production of this demand for meaning": "Without this demand for, without this susceptibility to, without this minimal participation in meaning, power is nothing but an empty simulacrum and an isolated effect of perspective" (Baudrillard, Shadow of the Silent Majorities

27). If, then, I go to the Pentagon Memorial and find an opaque modernist

137 "interpretive" experience that I am actively encouraged not to understand or be gratified by in any formal way, due to a lack of explicit guidance or accessible symbols or some combination of these, I may very well feel compelled to rectify this confusion by demanding that a meaning be given to me. In its engineered blankness, the memorial acts as a host to these meanings. The fact that the

Washington Post has put out an audio tour for Pentagon Memorial visitors speaks to the fabrication of this need (with its very existence challenging the stated philosophy of the site); an even more aggressive campaign for meaning may lead the visitor to the website of the Pentagon Memorial Fund itself, to find alongside the familiar claim of a hands-off memorial experience an explanatory video of the project and its inspiration hosted by John Walsh of America's Most

Wanted (http://www.pentaqonmemorial.net/multimedia/), where the semblance of neutral reflection is abandoned for an outright lesson in the "twisted act of barbarity" that led to the loss of 184 "souls" in the moment of their "supreme and unintended sacrifice." Perhaps this is the nature of bewilderment that Paul Virilio cites as the predictor of a "Communism of affects," based on "sharing emotions with millions, even billions of individuals...something unprecedented that no one has really noticed" (Virilio 231); the law of supply and demand is applied here to psychological conditioning, whereby we can assume, as Baudrillard and Virilio have, that a supply of meaning—and the apparatuses responsible for its creation and dissemination—can be legitimized if the public can be convinced that it wants to be told what to think and how to think.

138 The trouble with the Pentagon Memorial is the trouble identified in the observation shared by Edward Linenthal and James Young that the process of constructing a public tribute is supposed to be lengthy and taxing, and that expecting "memorial processes...to proceed smoothly, without rancor [is]...a strange assumption" (Linenthal 228), with Young going as far as saying he would prefer "a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions" over a "final solution" to the memorial that would, ironically, act as a continuation of the totalitarian power that initiated the events of the Holocaust (191). As if in defiance of the chaotic public haggling over meaning situated in the WTC and

Flight 93 memorial sites, as well as the inherent "incompleteness" of the memorial process suggested by Linenthal and Young, the Pentagon Memorial manages to neutralize opposition with a "polite control" that capitalizes on a motivated reworking of democratic participation, so that "not only does freedom of thought not undermine actual social servitude, it positively sustains it" (Zizek,

Welcome 3) The Pentagon Memorial, then, must necessarily be examined as a problematic success story, one that forces an alternative reading of the memorial space itself as a teachable experience banking on the efficacy of invoking democratic authorship in order to manipulate collective agreement. Famed educational philosopher John Dewey once asserted that the objective of education was always more education, and by teaching us to be taught, by teaching us to submit voluntarily to the terms of our moral indoctrination, the

Pentagon Memorial is itself a lesson in the precepts of tribute education.

139 Chapter Four

Pimp My Dump: Ground Zero's Makeover and the WTC Rebuild Project

When my spouse and I moved into a thirty-year-old "motivated seller"-grade home in the suburbs, we took on as a matter of course the requisite study of the renovation arts. Canonical texts would include, besides the free home improvement literature at Home Depot, the plethora of before-and-after shows on television: Trading Spaces, Take This Home and Sell It, Clean Sweep, While

You Were Out. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. There are, of course, the anticipated vague remarks about "getting ideas" and "finding retailers," but the kernel of genuine confessional-grade pleasure to be had in the consumption of makeover materials is in the "reveal." The grand reveal is a standby in any good makeover, the final cathartic moment in which proportional improvement is presented, measured, and held up for admiration. Featured panoramic shots cruise over what seem to be acres of gleaming hardwood flooring and fresh eggshell paint, their pristine loveliness in stark relief to the goldenrod-linoleum refuse that preceded them.

But the makeover solution is not limited to my largely insignificant difficulties as a new homeowner, nor is it confined to the province of home improvement. Makeovers are a symptom of a generalized cultural inclination towards repair that the maintenance of normalcy requires. Toward this end, anything, it seems, can be made over—anyone, too (as the success of numerous makeover shows demonstrates)—and brought back within the limits of social

140 tolerance; this normalizing operation is undertaken as a rescue mission to seize its object back from corrupting differences. The significance, then, of the reveal becomes apparent in this process and its designs for our collective cathartic benefit: the presentation of the after-picture is proof positive that the transformation has taken place and that it has been successful. In witnessing the redemption of a social leper, animate or inanimate, through the stages of the makeover, we relearn both the boundaries of acceptability and, in our conditioned abhorrence at the deformed and abject, we have our solidarity on the correct side of such boundaries renewed.

The completed making over of a thing, by its very definition, implies the bringing out of hidden beauty through reconstructive surgery; we are assured that a wrong has been corrected here, that the sin of unsightliness has been effectively rubbed out. Ugliness, the makeover tacitly suggests, is not a symptom of emotional anguish but its source. As such, it does not work with the image of what we are or ought to be in the hyperreality of the ego-ideal, "where only ideal imagery may enter" (Fussell 128). The service proffered by the makeover aims at a productive and comfortable conformity; objects, homes, and even people whose unattractiveness is so extreme as to constitute a major impediment or threat to the landscape of the ideal symbolic order must be domesticated and brought back into the fold. Order does not tolerate eyesores, and so the project of beautification invests itself in the reloading of symbolic value; if we can concede here with Roland Barthes's notion of the "mystifying spectacle" (84), we may follow it up with ways that explore how a grandiose September 11 makeover

141 project—the metamorphosis from the Pile to the Pit and, finally, the Memorial— signify a Rebirth at Ground Zero integral to the restorative work being undertaken at a far greater scale: the restoration of America as a nation after 9/11, whereby the act of restoration is to be understood doubly as both the revitalization of the physical condition of the space and as an episode in which the myth of "the phoenix rising from the ashes" becomes integrated into the larger understandings of self and other.

I will start unpacking the September 11 makeover spectacle at the site of the former World Trade Center by clarifying some of its modified temporal, spatial, and discursive boundaries: in situating the collapse of the World Trade

Center into Ground Zero at the "before" stage of a national post-9/11 makeover project, I am bordering the site off from the almost thirty years that they stood before the September 11 attacks, and deliberately so. Part of this analytical limitation has been imposed by the nature of the conversations had about the architecture of the World Trade Center since its destruction: these collectively and virtually without exception wax nostalgic about the site, its history, and its designer, Minoru Yamasaki. The point about the change in the skyline is invariably raised as a catalyst for thinking retrospectively about the symbolic value of the buildings, particularly the realized iconic capital of the Twin Towers that ultimately outshone their "limited architectural value" (Ouroussoff qtd. in

Skinner 38), but only after their total annihilation; otherwise, there is conspicuously little said about the WTC's life before its demise, and even after its

1993 terrorist attack, there were few charged opinions circulating outside of those

142 presented by architectural critics, who generally continued to peg the towers as

dismal and vacuous. Yamasaki, who described his design philosophy as a

romantic search for an "aspirational quality" in his buildings, was frequently

labelled an oddball within the field of American Modernist design for his use of

elaborate detailing (National Trust for Historic Preservation); the World Trade

Center, which carried his famous "wedding cake" ornamental textures, was more

often criticized than lauded, and before he succumbed to cancer in 1986,

Yamasaki was even demonized by some elite design circles for singlehandedly

"killing" Modern urban revival design with his Pruitt-lgoe housing complex in St.

Louis (which was itself made-over in 1976 with demolition and subsequent

rebuilding—but not before making it into several architecture textbooks as the

"wrong way" to design a Modernist complex [National Trust for Historic

Preservation]). Because Yamasaki saw neither the 1993 attack nor the collapse

of the Towers, the limited commentary he offered on the design was only that the

site "[must] become the living representation of the faith of man in humanity, of

his need for individual dignity, of his trust in cooperation and, through this, of his

ability to find greatness" (qtd. in Skinner 41); Baudrillard, in his Requiem for the

Twin Towers asserts that these goals, unachievable by the buildings so long as they stood, would be attained by their pulverization: "Their end in material space

has borne them off into a definitive imaginary space. By the grace of terrorism, the World Trade Center has become the world's most beautiful building—the eighth wonder of the world!" (52) Only after the towers fell was their semiotic

143 relevance given a language, one that would, besides voicing the nature of their loss, also reverse-engineer the motivations of the terrorists, who

with such murderous accuracy chose their targets for a reason. They

didn't attack Los Angeles and Miami, after all. Why not? It's reasonable

to assume that they chose cities and buildings that they believed had

great symbolic and actual potency: the respective headquarters of the

military and financial institutions whose decisions have tremendous impact

throughout the globe. (Wallace 11)

So, while the buildings, of course, existed physically for almost three decades before their spectacular demolition, their entry into the language of myth after

September 11 effectively birthed them as a point of symbolic relevance.

Elaborating on Martin Heidegger's comments about the essencing (that is, the making of essences) quality of language, Zizek adds about the twinning of speaking and thinking and their combined influence on the gravity of symbolic meaning that

[a] change in our sensitivity is sustained by language; it hinges on the shift

in our symbolic universe. A fundamental violence exists in this

"essencing" ability of language: our world is given a partial twist, it loses

its balanced innocence, one partial colour gives the tone of the whole.

The operation designated...as that of hegemony is inherent to language.

(Violence 68)

The World Trade Center and its satellite sites—Fresh Kills and Ground Zero— prove to be instances of such "partial colour" coming into symbolic play after 9/11

144 in restoring national monomyths; the "second life of historical record bestowed upon the WTC has the effect of erasing former references in order to accommodate a productive memory of events, one that "locates the community in time and space, giving it an appreciation of its own past as well as a sense of its future" (Vance 9). In light of these additional considerations and the visibility of the disaster for which the WTC would become the focal point, it becomes easier to see a parallel fixation on the same site for rebuilding and recolonizing the space in memorial practices and the high-profile transformation spectacle that these would effect.

The need for rebuilding the WTC as a heroic commemorative ornament is seated firmly in the trash and the semiotic terrain that trash occupies. What makes garbage so problematic is its latitude; it has a way of eliminating boundaries and hierarchies of meaning, of conforming everything within its reach to its deterrorializing ethic. The World Trade Center's collapse into dust and rubble constituted its symbolic and literal entry into the domain of trash; this phase was confirmed when the Fresh Kills waste disposal site, which had closed only months earlier (in March 2001), was reopened to receive the remains of the site. With tons of waste materials—including human remains—crossing between the sites, the dump at Fresh Kills was effectively a continuation of the Pile at

Ground Zero; such an overlap would be untenable alongside the memorial aspirations of the space, however, due to the dissonance between garbage and its amnesiac properties and the reinstatement of myth in order to "[justify] the

8 Michelet's term, used by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities.

145 social or political order on the grounds that it was ordained by history" (Vance 9), an end that public commemoration works directly to satisfy. In other words, because the concrete facts were what they were—the Pile had to be cleared to aid the investigations on-site and to prepare the sixteen acres of the WTC estate for reconstruction, and the Fresh Kills landfill, for logistical reasons, had been selected for managing the WTC waste—restoring mythic equilibrium would be contingent upon the recovery of the space itself, rather than the salvaging efforts generated around the property or human remains it contained. Thus, the manipulation of the grounds eventuates a new ideation of the space, one that is domesticated to what Foucault, in further developing engineer Alexandre de

MaTtre's city planning schemata, terms a "grid of sovereignty," a system that

"connects] the political effectiveness of sovereignty to a spatial distribution...[for] a territory that is well policed in terms of its obedience to the sovereign is a territory that has a good spatial layout...linked to the idea of an intensity of circulations; circulation of ideas, of wills, and of orders" (Security 14-15). When the governance of a territory's meaning is invested so immediately in the physical control of a space and its appearance, its development elucidates the value of reinscribing a "punctuality" (Delueze and Guattari's expression) on a randomized field and thereby rendering its memories and omissions predictable once more.

I currently live and work in Vancouver (the Greater Vancouver Regional

District, to be more precise), the host city for the 2010 Olympics that is hastily undergoing a similarly motivated transformation towards de-uglifying itself. Like most North American cities, Vancouver is blighted by the problems that largely

146 define urban centres, and like most of its counterparts it is experiencing difficulties managing the more unsightly parts of itself; it is an impossibility to erase fully or even hide the concrete evidence of dumpster divers along the streets (and outside of cartoons9, turning the impoverished into mailboxes raises as least as many practical questions as it does ethical ones). What has been going on, though, ever so subtly, is the repackaging of the act of going through discarded materials—garbage—as "freeganism" or "urban foraging," with the latter term used to describe more need-driven activities formerly known collectively as dumpster diving. Other words driving the discussion around dumpster diving in Vancouver include "recovery" and "reclaiming," words meant to redirect one's thoughts away from the disruptive frankness of dumpster diving or the accompanying image of garbage, of someone wading hip-deep in refuse.

The specialized wordplay is assigned to neutralize a special kind of grossness garbage calls up, one that, despite the possession of an obvious ethnographic richness that Wallace Stegner captures and labels "our poetry and our history"

(Stegner 141) waiting to be found in the dump, makes it generally inhospitable to the more idyllic narratives of self-understanding. Euphemisms can do the work of renaming trash, but the psychological association between garbage and the

9 This is admittedly a bad joke, but one that is not strictly hyperbolic when applied to a pre- 2010 Vancouver that bemoans, daily, its conspicuous transient population. In the Simpsons episode "You Only Move Twice," Homer ends up accidentally working for a Bondian supervillain, Hank Scorpio. One of the terms of his new employment is to become a resident of Cypress Creek, a planned community built over what was once a dingy run-down town; a promotional video provided by the Globex Corporation captures the transformation spectacle that is the gentrification that the planned community of Cypress Creek brings with it: parking meters become trees, dilapidated buildings turn into coffee shops and boutiques, and a homeless man turns into a mailbox.

147 more unsavoury concepts attached to it (of filth, disease, anonymity) remains for most of us unshakeable nonetheless. We probably know less about the pedigree of the items we exchange our hard-earned money for at the local supermarket, and those who have worked in a restaurant, as I have, can attest to the dubious quality control that exists in such places. In short, the stuff people pay for to use every day is as mysterious (maybe more mysterious) and as unclean (maybe more unclean) than what ends up in the dumpster down the street, but because items that are bought are wanted and are not, therefore, garbage, they are inoculated symbolically against the suggestions made about what ends up as rubbish.

The trash can, the dumpster, the landfill—these are receptacles reserved for the redundant, disposable, and outright nasty. We make a lot of trash—on average about four and a half pounds a day, individually—out of all sorts of things, but despite its many tributaries and components, garbage has as its common denominator a collective voiding of value:

To call something "garbage" means that the possessor of the object

has lost desire for it. Desire has passed, and with it goes value. The

value of the object evaporates....To call something "garbage" means

stripping the materials of their inherent characteristics. So that even

though differences are obvious, hard becomes the same as soft, wet

as dry, heavy as light, moldy old sour cream as a shoe, wet leaves as

old barbells—they become the same things. The entire culture

colludes in this un-naming. Then we can call it "garbage"—of no

148 value whatsoever. To put it away, actually paying to put it away, as

soon as possible. Thus forgotten. (Ukeles 4, my italics)

The garbage-ness of garbage immediately overwrites any former meaning or identity a discarded object may have had. Consequently, garbage is resistant to the absorption of new narratives and signification, and as a thing that un-writes meanings, it is thus especially ill-suited for the uses of commemoration; as Ukeles suggests, objects are thrown away to be forgotten and to be un-named, and the enveloping muckiness of garbage, especially within the dump that is its terminus, means that everything that ends up in the trash is "infected" with the same sense of worthlessness.

So, what happens when the resting place for human remains becomes forcibly commingled with the dump space? No doubt this happens every so often, if the many mafia movie at-the-dump whackings I have seen have any truth at all behind them, and again, the clandestine killings and burials at the dump seem to take advantage of the very amorphousness and amnesiac blankness of rubbish spaces outlined above. However, the Fresh

Kills landfill on Staten Island, which received the rubble and ashes from the former World Trade Center, which included human remains, replays the dramatic dilemma around the dual and incompatible roles of a site as garbage dump and public mass grave simultaneously. I refer in my introduction to the re-enactment of this dichotomy at Fresh Kills upon the mounds of transferred materials extracted from Ground Zero and to the forced divergence and movement between these two spaces; the result of

149 this incidental retasking, a shared space to house the contradictory spectacles of public wreckage and public memorial, is what The Recovery, in all its stages, specifically aims to obviate.

A WTC Families for Proper Burial poster illustrates the convergence of the dump's traditional meaning with the new charge of gravesite most succinctly: "My Daddy is not Garbage. 'ASHES TO ASHES...DUST TO

DUMP'—DO NOT LET THIS BE THEIR FINAL RESTING PLACE" ("We Will

Never Forget"). Prior to their arrival at Fresh Kills, however, the problem of the confused remains finding "proper" placement would drive the rate and method of cleanup at Ground Zero, which had, after the attacks, become both an instantaneous mass grave and its own in situ dump. The tangle of dust and WTC remnants became the Pile. After the fact, of course, the site has since taken on other incarnations: burial ground, cemetery, hallowed ground (Kurgan 96), but these meanings could only root themselves in the area after its conversion from the Pile to the manageable topography of the

Pit, and the expedient and aggressive cleanup effort would mark the effort to redraw an all-important line between chaos and order. A November 2001 article in The Guardian documented the hasty progress on-site:

The construction workers who work there do not all it Ground Zero.

To them it is simply "the pile." Their war is not with the Taliban or

even Bin Laden—they never get a look-in. Their war is with the pile.

It is a war they are winning. In eight weeks they have shifted

an estimated 350 000 tons, nobody knows for sure how much....

150 The battle line at ground zero is military in its precision. Four

companies have divided the work among them, quartering the site....

Yet this is also a scene that depicts America's can-do spirit in

extremis. Some phoenix will rise from all this...[b]ut leaving Ground

Zero you do find yourself wondering, will the world put even a tenth of

the effort and money into rescuing Afghanistan as is being deployed in

salvaging this small part of lower Manhattan? (Snow 1-2)

The radicalization of the terrain through the destruction of the Twin Towers would also mean a subversion of its spatial limits, such that everything was at once Othered, like the moonscape Vonnegut describes a firebombed

Dresden as being in Slaughterhouse-Five ("Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody...was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design" [171]). The pile created by the fallen Towers represented an unacceptable deformity; a defect that signified a lapse in the myth of exceptionalism, it resisted commemorative effort by challenging its poetics with what Baudrillard refers to as an "excess of reality" (18). Its eventual normalization would require that it appear less like a dump heap and more like the kind of "striated space" that Deleuze and Guattari propose as the blank canvas whose homogenous dimensions prepare it to be populated with the objects of official, formalized significance—in other words, a preliminary, reductive makeover. So, the "war" that was immediately waged against the

151 Pile—a nine-month (original timeline was one year [Lacayo 1]), $7 billion project—extended well beyond the pragmatic business of pre-construction cleanup into the gesture towards post-traumatic closure and symbolic rebuilding, making the question posed by Snow in the Guardian article entirely a rhetorical one. Afghanistan can be made a dump and stay a dump because to Us it lacks memorial significance; Iraq, with its multiplied mass graves, can be energetically carpet-bombed ad infinitum. On the other hand,

Ground Zero, a sixteen-acre blemish of steaming rubble, required a spectacular and immediate recovery. It would be the very public fixation point for a great purging, one that would serve as the foundation for the building of the official memorial and the transformation spectacle accompanying its creation; the first step, though, was for it to be tidied up.

While the sight of the Pile would probably have been the more authenticating

Ground Zero experience, its dump-like explosion of order would ultimately exclude it from the general history-making process:

At first, the clearing away of the pile was designated an emergency

and carried out away from the view of the public. Lower Manhattan

was initially a restricted area, blocked off from view. Looking was

discouraged and photographs forbidden, and the presence of the

curious was frowned upon by the police who guarded the

perimeters...police told people at the site to "show respect" by putting

their cameras away. (Sturken, "Aesthetics" 316)

152 In discussing the meaning of Ground Zero, one may invoke the Pile, but only as a means of "rendering differences useful" (Foucault, Discipline 184); in other words, it has been relegated fully to the Before pictures in the records of the Ground Zero "phoenix discourse" (Hajer's term), a point of departure for the cultivation of civic memory and, as such, a prototypical "molar entity10" in which myth is grounded:

Following the law of arborescence11, it is this central Point that moves

across all of space or the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a

certain distinctive opposition...male-(female), adult-(child), white-

(black, yellow, or red); rational-(animal) [and I would add to this list

Us-(Them)]...Man constitutes himself as a gigantic memory, through

the position of the central point... (Deleuze and Guattari 294)

Consequently, while the invocation of this destruction would serve as the default point of origin for the grander narratives of recovery post-9/11, its appearance in the immediate wake of the attacks would not then be projected further into a role as mass gravesite for the September 11 dead; the role of the dump space is limited to being the anathema against which normalcy is prescribed and constructed.

The renegotiating of Ground Zero from incidental trash heap to a place of mass grieving and remembrance would first rely upon a re-

10 Here Deleuze and Guattari are borrowing an analogy from chemistry—the relationship between molecules and moles (very large groupings of molecules—6.02 X 1023 molecules, to be exact)—to explain how marginalized ("molecular") systems relate to dominant ("molar") ones. 11 Tree-like fixedness; opposite of rhizomatic (root-like) systems and practices, which emphasize the elimination of central figures. 153 inscription of a familiar order and, subsequently, the corrective application of

ideological value. A few months into cleanup, Ground Zero had its new face

on and was safely beyond its previous disorderly state:

By December, [the police] had become more accommodating to the

crowds; as one officer [stated to Sturken], "People have the right to

look." In January, a well-designed viewing ramp was

constructed...and tickets were awarded for the view. By the spring,

the New York Times and other publications were running travel

features on where to eat downtown after visiting Ground Zero,

effectively constructing the site as a tourist destination....ceremonies

have been held at the site, each declaring it to have been

transformed. (Sturken "Aesthetics" 316-317)

By May 2002, the first battle for reclaiming Ground Zero was "won," and those overseeing the cleanup could announce triumphantly that "[w]hat was

'the Pile,' a jagged mountain of knotted steel and concrete, [was] now a hole, a neatly squared-off, rectangular cavity of 16 brown acres" (Lacayo 1).

However, with the space of Ground Zero successfully rehabilitated, the Pile's contents still awaited a similar makeover: Marita Sturken describes in detail the ritualized process that would attempt to change the remains from anonymous dust and detritus into a sanctified substance:

In October 2001, Mayor Giuliani set up a procedure through which

each of the families of the dead received an urn of the dust from the

154 site for a memorial ceremony. This dust (which was otherwise being

hauled from the site to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island) was

gathered into 55-gallon drums, blessed by a chaplain at Ground Zero,

and given a police escort to One Police Plaza.

There, officials scooped the dust into bags, which they held in

gloved hands. Each family was then given a five-inch urn of dust with

"9-11-01" engraved on it, wrapped in a blue velvet bag. Here the dust

was transformed into a substance that was understood to be

sacramental and ceremonial—moved from drums (indicating refuse)

to urns (indicating individuals, ashes, the remains of life)—yet also

official (accompanied by police escort). (313)

The assumption that Sturken goes on to make about the remains, however, is that after having gone through these sacred rites, the debris "had already been transformed through its relocation into the category of rubbish" (314) instantly upon its arrival at Fresh Kills, and that as quickly as these materials became imbued with symbolic relevance, they were just as easily stripped of this meaning upon entering the landfill, where they were to be, as Ukeles has already suggested, doomed to be forgotten; it is precisely this equivalence between the dumpsite and the absence of memory that makes Fresh Kills landfill, like the Pile, unimaginable to so many people as burial space: "The

City would never do that. They would never mingle human remains in a place where they put garbage; that would collapse a taboo in our whole culture. That crosses a line" (Ukeles 1). However, the magical

155 transformative power of the remains' entry into the dump was merely an elaboration of a change that had already taken place, a change that the insistence upon ritualized propriety worked to undo; the line had already been crossed over when the World Trade Center became an open grave and human parts became integrated into the unsightly Pile, which was in turn excised from the site. The transfer of the dead out of The Pile at Ground

Zero was only the first step of many that worked towards reterritorializing the space at Ground Zero and domesticating it sufficiently to allow for it to be reconstructed as a memorial space. There was, undoubtedly, an urgency to clear the space, and this haste was initiated by the practical and ideological reasons already noted; Sturken suggests that the operation to remove the rubble not only conflicted with the desire to see the site as a sacred repository of the dead, but it was "relentlessly about clearing away, scouring clean, and wiping out the physical debris of September 11" (316); however, on the matter of such cleanup actually being requisite to the process of commemoration, Sturken is generally silent (her article "The aesthetics of

Absence" concentrates on the analysis of things—dust, debris, memorial designs—over actions), suggesting only that the dust from the collapse of the

Towers was both a physical and symbolic obstacle in the rush to memorialize the site and return to "normal" living:

Even as the shock of what had happened was still being reflected, the

city developed an army of sanitation trucks to begin scouring away the

dust. Thus dust was initially understood as a substance that had to be

156 cleaned away so that life could continue, as an impediment to moving

forward. (312)

However, I see the removal and relocation of materials as significant in their own right, their treatment in the process of cleanup as symbolically revealing; besides effectively reinscribing a grid of organization onto the chaos at

Ground Zero, the removal of ruined materials also had something to say about the performative aspect of their meanings. True, certain objects have been left in place, "transformed from refuse into artifacts of history" (Sturken

316), but for the relocated materials on their way out of Ground Zero and headed to the dump at Fresh Kills, nothing more could be done except a further, fruitless exaggeration of ritual: despite its ceremonious departure, the WTC dust would be taken to Fresh Kills landfill alongside everything else cleared from the vicinity where it would then join and be sorted from the more common stuff of Manhattan's waste.

At 2200 acres, roughly two and a half times the size of central park,

Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world (factsheet, www.nyc.gov/freshkills); closed in March 2001, it was temporarily reopened immediately after the September 11 attacks to receive the debris cleared from Ground Zero for sorting. Approximately 1.62 tons of rubble would be sifted at Fresh Kills between September 2001 and July 2002, primarily at

Mound 1/9. The debris, which was comprised mostly of dust and ashes, was divided up into separate piles based on content, with two piles reserved exclusively for debris that included human remains; however, once the sifting

157 process had been completed to the satisfaction of authorities on-site (the

WTC was treated as a crime scene, so all removed materials had to be first sifted for evidence at Fresh Kills in provisional investigation centres run jointly by the NYPD and FBI [Bellew n.p.]—in this case, down to pieces one- quarter of an inch wide or larger—before being put aside), the two piles were mixed back in with the "ordinary" garbage and left there (Fenton 2).

Ultimately, what this meant was that the sorted debris was left on the same forty acres of Fresh Kills it was processed on, an eventuality that really should have surprised no one as much as it did, given the sheer amount of materials involved (the selection of Fresh Kills in the first place as the processing site anticipated the logistical concerns that came with the sorting and, in the end, storage of tons of material); even so, some victims' families have since referred to this act as a "national disgrace": "Some were firemen, some were police officers, some were just ordinary working stiffs. Now they were all buried together in what has become the only cemetery on the world that is located in the middle of a garbage dump" (Fenton 2). Groups such as the WTC Families for Proper Burial argue that a proper burial would require a even more through resitting and recovery of human remains, followed by relocation and "proper and decent burial at an appropriate site befitting those who died on September 11" (WTCFPB v. City of New York, Amended

Complaint document section 7), a plan with a projected cost of over one billion dollars (though this estimate has been called a gross exaggeration by the WTCFPB in their amended complaint against the city) and which was

158 signed into legislation in January 2004 by then New Jersey Governor Jim

McGreevy (http://www.wtcfamiliesforproperburial.com/Editorial.htm);

predictably, though, the cost and scale of the endeavour met resistance from

the City of New York, which cites "the sensibility of not moving the ash back

to Lower Manhattan after having shifted it once already." It is, as Mayor

Bloomberg has pointed out, "a lot of stuff to move" (Fenton 4). However,

beyond the more obvious questions surrounding how such an operation

could be undertaken, there is the more philosophical question of why such a

move is necessary: the insistence upon a need to reclaim the lost remains

and remove them, literally, from the trash illustrates what Edward Linenthal

identifies as "one of the major, major cultural trends of our times...a way of

protesting the anonymity of mass death in our time...[and a way of] saying,

'we don't know how to prevent this, but we're going to make sure these dead

are not forgotten" (Linenthal qtd. in MacDonald), a project that demands

"parting with a certain measure of practicality that has long been a hallmark

of [a] mobile, rapidly changing culture" (MacDonald).

Perhaps it is not simply a line of decency that the dump-as-grave transgresses, but the line, the limit that defines the memorial itself. The transubstantiation of physical space into memory demands a management of the sort that the liminality of the garbage dump problematizes. The

"confused heterogeneity" (Theweleit's term) of the landfill and its contents— even one with an irresistibly morbid name as Fresh Kills (derived from the

Middle Dutch word kille ("riverbed"); the modern Dutch word is kil)—resists

159 the containment requisite to proper commemoration and its approved poetic pathways. Graves as memorial sites necessitate demarcation, the process of territorialization or reterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari's expressions). When one walks into a cemetery, or a former battleground, or another such place of public remembrance, one enters a place that has become individuated as sacred ground; it is uniform and univocal, designed for the purpose of domesticating, even prescribing interpretation. Referring again to the WTCFPB poster, one may note that both dust and dump, however, are contrary to this order; their effluvia assimilate what they touch into the collective amnesiac mass. The free-flowing dust, the lost "flying dust" Ukeles mentions in her reflections on Fresh Kills, is the same dust that seemed to blanket everything in the aftermath of the Towers' destruction; the same dust would later be found to be, in a more literal sense, a contagion whose pathogenic properties are only being discovered. The fill, too, fights against being held in and manages to seep and ooze past barriers, which is why the work of giving Fresh Kills the long-awaited makeover that will transform it from landfill to "Lifescape," the proposed renovation design, will take decades; approximately ten to thirty years is how long it will take to compress enough "clean fill" (topsoil) over the garbage to hold in enough of its flowing contaminants. Currently, the air is also taken over by the trash; several articles about the Fresh Kills renewal project refer to the stink of garbage that lingers over and near the dump. Entropy is the logic of the

160 rubbish; its mutable, unpredictable nature is what makes its "filth" unmanageable, and, therefore, a source of real psychic anxiety:

Dirt is, first and foremost, anything that impinges on the tidy singularity

of a person [living or dead, I would suggest as an extension of this

argument], on the person's anxiously guarded autonomy....By

analogy, they are disgusted at the prospect of contamination,

heterogeneity. When confronted with such contamination, they

become afraid of falling prey themselves to ambivalence and

amorphousness, of losing themselves, of being harmed by a process

of amalgamation, insertion, addition, extraction, seepage, or

infiltration....

[People's] fear, after contamination by dirt, is of decay. They

turn away in fright when something at the bottom moves toward the

top, or something at the top moves toward the bottom; also when a

structure dissolves (or the reverse): a rotting mushroom, or a nose

appearing on a knee. Along with the dirt of decay, finally, there is the

dirt of the mass. As individual entities, people despise anything that

throngs or sprawls, any mass in which they might become caught up

and irretrievably lost. (Theweleit 385)

Consequently, there has been among many families of the World Trade

Center missing a call for the replacement of a distinction that will make proper memorialization possible. This threat of being lost in the miasma of

161 the Fresh Kills dump space stimulates both the protest for the continued recovery of remains for the "lost" 110012 and the instructions for all remains to be interred outside of and away from Fresh Kills. It also delineates the limits of what can be understood as the "democracy of death"; the dead of the September 11 attacks have been, in official memorial narratives, held up as a "perfect" model of democracy: a model community build out of those martyred in the same fiery instant. The victims of 9/11 were all, as the New

York Times obituary series Portraits (and numerous other tributes) would remind us, "heroes," but even as their shared misfortune would unite them, it became even more necessary to insist upon the individual identities that made up the dead. The democracy of death calls upon this need for a naming, and in the case of a mass grave in a public dump, this imperative directly addresses the threat of anonymity and subsequent amnesia, such that

in this 50-year-old sculpture we have all produced, of four mountains

made from 150 million cubic yards of the un-differentiated, un-named,

no-value garbage, whose every iota of material identity has been

banished, the memorial, graveyard—or whatever it is—needs to be

created out of an utterly opposite kind of social contract. The

12 The number of confirmed DNA identifications continues to change. Prior to October 2006, the number of victims whose DNA had not been located stood at 1151; however, that month, Con Edison maintenance crews discovered almost 1800 new, viable pieces of DNA in excavated manholes. These samples are still undergoing testing, and to date the last person to be identified through these new samples is Manuel Emilio Mejia, a member of the kitchen staff in the WTC restaraunt Windows on the World whose remains were identified April 2, 2009. Between 2007 and 2009, over twenty new positive identifications were completed using the new samples and/or implementing new DNA testing technologies ("Another 9/11 victim identified"). 162 shattered taboo that enabled this unholy shotgun marriage needs to

be restored; a chasm-change in attitude is required, one of very

deliberate differentiating, of naming, of attentive reverence for each

mote of dust from each lost individual. Thus remembered. This must

become a place that returns identity to, not strips identity from, each

perished person. (Ukeles 4)

At the time of this writing, almost eight years after 9/11, some families continue to petition for a new search for human remains at Fresh Kills; in

August 2005, seventeen of these families collectively sought an injunction that would force the city to remove, resift, and rebury13 almost two tons of debris, but in July 2008, the request was dismissed, the judge concluding that "[a]ll human remains that could be identified, were identified...Only dust remains" (Feuer n.p.)—and, as Ukeles had foreseen in her earliest end-use conceptualizations of the Fresh Kills site, the problem has always been the dust:

What will happen to all this debris? There will definitely be some kind

of memorial for the catastrophe: for the people; for the attack on US

soil; for the towers that we feel have been torn out of us. This will be

at Ground Zero. But what about the dust at the Fresh Kills Landfill? It's

not about the body parts that are found. They'll remove the identifiable

fingers and toes, run DNA tests, and return them to families. It's the

13 Off-site, naturally: many victims' families, have expressed an interest in reburying the remains at Ground Zero, which would effectively and ironically close the circuit of the debris's travels from the Pile to the dump and back. 163 flying dust that is full of thousands of unfound, incinerated human

beings. This will be their graveyard, (n.p.)

Ukeles's observations about the "flying dust," taken now in tandem with the judge's final comment, best pinpoints the central frustration that the dust

represents for the case plaintiffs as well as the 9/11 commemoration efforts

generally at Fresh Kills: when the remains have been atomized to the

degree that they were at the WTC site, compartmentalization of the kind that the grieving families aspire to becomes improbable on a number of levels.

With the practical difficulty of moving and then screening 1.8 tons of pieces each measuring less than one-quarter of an inch for DNA samples functionally eliminating the option of complete testing, there is always the

basic problem of not knowing whose remains are present or absent in a given sample. Ultimately, the grounds for dismissing the case, that "[a] plaintiffs property rights to claim a body for burial were predicated on knowing in fact that it belonged to a loved one," (Feuer n.p.) mirror the motivation for the families' grievance in the first place, and why only one of the two 9/11 memorials included in the Fresh Kills renewal proposal was unchallenged (the one planned as an "earthworks" memorial commemorating the recovery effort on the site was approved unanimously, while the memorial on Mound 1/9 for the victims is being contested). For all its ecological tropes and adopted "celebration of life" funereal cliches, Fresh

Kills cannot, in my estimation, ever become an accepted space to commemorate the 9/11 dead because, as David Simpson explains,

164 "Memorials and monuments, it must be said, seem to require concentration

and specification. Without the names of the dead and some account of the

occasion of their death, these structures cannot subsist through time as

memorials" (70); the Fresh Kills site and its previous life as a dumpsite

directly opposes the specificity deemed necessary by so many for the

building of a memorial to the victims of September 11. The mother of one

victim, when asked by The New York Times for her input regarding the Fresh

Kills 9/11 memorial structures, offered a response that makes the

"performative interpretation" (Derrida qtd. in Simpson 142) of sacred ground

plainer still: "When the planning commission asked us what kind of memorial we wanted there, we wrote back to say we never want a memorial...We would rather bury pulverized concrete in a respectful place than to have our

loved ones left with the garbage" (DePalma n.p., my emphasis). While earlier memorial audiences were satisfied with pieces that gained their

instructive and aesthetic power through a deliberate, impactful lack of detail that allowed them to be more than just "memorials] to a time" (Vance, note to the author 24 Jun 2009), the commemorative audience after September

11 has shown an inclination, in practice if not in theory, towards the episodic.

The imperative of recognizing individual identity through explicit labelling has also radically shifted the interpretation of the memorial spaces planned as part of the Ground Zero rebuild project. Initially, because of the de facto designation of the space as a mass grave, a randomized monument quickly was proposed as the truest reflection of the thanato-democracy that

165 the WTC dead comprised; however, there was prompt and outraged public opposition to this "utterly democratic" arrangement from people like Anthony

Gardner and Janet Roy, spokespeople for the high-profile victims' family group Take Back the Memorial, who claim,

Mayor Bloomberg, by fiat, chose the memorial plan that lists only the

names of the dead, reducing the 9/11 victims to mere letters and

stripping them of any human condition connected to their memory...

Fear that some victims may evoke greater pity than others

leads the mayor to impose grief of a lowest common denominator. No

one will be equipped with the context that might enable them to learn

from history and mourn any genuinely distinct individual among 2,979

slaughtered innocents. Those whose skin and bones were blasted

over 16 acres are to be rendered indistinguishable.

Military and municipal employees are stripped of rank. The

flight attendant who fought to warn the world is left anonymous. That

one in four New York dead worked for one firm is withheld. Three 11-

year-olds must eternally cry for attention, hidden among thousands of

adults. The despair of the Hanson family, which lost a son and

daughter-in-law who died along with their 2-year-old toddler, is paved

over. No artifacts, no mention of Sept. 11, 2001. No American flag. No

history. Just a visitor center that bisects and obstructs the view

166 millions will journey to see. And in its shadow, two pools in a city park.

(Take Back the Memorial.org, my italics)

Such arguments make it clear that the randomization of the names sits unacceptably close for some to rendering a kind of anonymity in opposition to a vocal demand for individuality, one that appears to be growing proportionately to the overall nationalization of the memorial and general rebuild project; upon closer inspection, the supposed necessity for such divisions also becomes evident. According to Take Back the Memorial,

Bloomberg's offense was to act by fiat—that is, undemocratically—but in the same complaint it is obvious that Bloomberg's call was not the real issue; the problem was that his proposed resolution wasn't undemocratic enough. The great fear for Gardner and Roy, and people who share their interest in reinstating distinctions in the memorial design, is of the possibility of a democracy that threatens to produce "grief of a lowest common denominator," namely one that would cancel out their privileged position in the domain of grief. Against this travesty, a return to specificity and literalness, they argue, is required: just as the rebuild project design would later shift from the plurality that inspired the International Freedom Center and the Gardens of the World to the American-centric Freedom Tower, so, too, would the focus of memorializing the dead contract its focus from the accidental democracy of the necropolis to the individuated cemetery. As in the dump space, the threat is the abstraction and disappearance that results from an extremity of full inclusion, one that drowns out biography:

167 Anonymity hurts. More than that, as Freud perceived, it robs us of the

power to mourn. To mourn is useful and therapeutic. But we must

know the sum and total of what we have lost, or else we shall

succumb to melancholia, which is a ruinously pathological state.

Names give us that measure. We read them, touch them, take them in

— and so pass on, consoled in this basic way. (Spivey n.p.)

Funerals, as a formal expression of grief, serve the living; this is not simply a pat observation but one that gestures towards an understanding of the psychological nature of the investment that has gone towards this struggle over how to remember the dead. Memorials, too, are an instrument for speaking personal grief in a way that humanizes loss, and any WTC memorial, as a site for public reflection, does not preclude this dimension of remembrance. However, as hallowed ground, its role is necessarily multifarious, traversing the interests that

"own" the dead, both private and public, for "[a]ll of us now hold a symbolic deed to the World Trade Center site" (Linenthal n.p.). And, as is the case in such discursive contestations, some voices and some victims are more equal than others, with those accustomed to dominance seeking to transfer their hierarchal entitlements elsewhere; in this context, the objection to the democratized arrangement of the memorial is more of an objection to the loss of primacy—a void that the fetishism over the naming of names and the hierarchy of grief it imposes work to undo. As it was pointed out to me, the way in which projects commemorating September 11 have made privileged voices a priority (as opposed to memorials in Europe and Asia, which are more accepting of

168 democratic and subaltern arrangements; Jochen Gerz's countermemorial pieces in Germany and France are outstanding examples of such forms) suggests that

"Americans build monuments to themselves, not to ideas" (Blackmore).

I was asked by anthropologist Arthur Neal if the former World Trade

Center, in its more recent incarnation as Ground Zero, had indeed made the transformation to become a sort of sacred ground. The answer for me now, as it was then, is yes, but for reasons that are both economically14 and ideologically pragmatic, it is a burial ground that will and must eventually be broken and built upon; the real questions are really around when and how the succeeding phases of this change will occur. The fact that the WTC rebuild's master plan remains in limbo—with a major overhaul announced May 11, 2009 (more on its implications shall follow in this chapter) and a new estimated completion time set at 2037—is a testament to how competing concerns around the site have managed to neutralize each other, and outlines the formidable gaps that myth has been called in to fill. It is cases such as that of Ground Zero's rebuild that make myth, as the symbolic value of language, so entirely useful. As Barthes points out, the value of myth lies in its productive artifice:

The concept reconstitutes a chain of causes and effects, motives and

intentions. Unlike the form [signifier], the concept is in no way abstract; it

is filled with a situation. Through the concept, it is a whole new history

which is implanted in the myth....One must firmly stress this open

14 As I write this entry in June 2009, even after a steep decline in global office markets Midtown Manhattan office real estate remains the most expensive in the Americas at $68 per square foot (Weiss n.p.). 169 character of the concept; it is not at all an abstract, purified essence; it is a

formless, unstable, nebulous condensation, whose unity and coherence

are above all due to its function. (118-119, my italics)

In the case of the former World Trade Center, the rebuild project was motivated and inspired by the frenetic symbolic posturing around the site postmortem already discussed thus far into this chapter; as a result, any restoration project on the lot would have to take into account Ground Zero's nexus of roles after

September 11: vacant lot, gravesite, memorial/tribute, "phoenix discourse."

Jean Baudrillard describes in The Spirit of Terrorism a discursive vacuum being left by the attacks and the literal speechlessness in the wake of the symbolic violence of the terrorist act:

We try retrospectively to impose some kind of meaning on it, to find some

kind of interpretation. But there is none. And it is the radicality of the

spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle, which alone is original and

irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle

upon us. And, against this immoral fascination (even if it unleashes a

universal moral reaction), the political order can do nothing. (30)

However, while Baudrillard's assessment of the immediate fallout of disconcerting silence around the events of 9/11 may be accurate, in the following years I have seen the talk and attendant moral upheaval around the event gain momentum to become the equal and opposite reaction to terror that he suggests is absent. There is terror on terror, spectacle against spectacle; the political order, it turns out, can do something—it can rebuild. And in rebuilding it

170 [reestablishes order, better and stronger, by its very insistence that there is a perfection to return to, that before the altering events of September 11 there had been order. The traumatic event that Slavoj Zizek describes in The Sublime

Object of Ideology as "thoroughly precarious" is to be assembled after the fact to account for the present state of affairs:

[It is] a point of failure of symbolization, but at the same time never given

in its positivity—it can be construed only backwards, from its structural

effects. All its effectivity lies in the distortions it produces in the symbolic

universe of the subject: the traumatic event is ultimately just a fantasy-

construct filling out a certain void in a symbolic structure and, as such, the

retroactive effect of this structure. (169)

Specific to the Twin Towers, Michael Lewis describes the reinscription of meaning as a way to bring sense to the seemingly senseless events of

September 11:

Prior to their destruction in 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade

Center were a civic monument only in the honorific sense. They were

commercial office buildings that had thrust their way aggressively to the

top of the New York skyline. Only foreign visitors were likely to view them

as a symbol of the United States; ten of these visitors destroyed them.

Their obliteration as emblems of American identity inadvertently gave

them that status, and the minimalist skyscrapers were retroactively

transformed into a kind of patriotic shrine. (10)

171 "Some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning" (Fussell 143), but to construct a meaning backwards -the very act of creating this meaning—creates the phantasm of possibility. The answer is available, it seems, in a Fisher King sort of way, if invoked by the right line of questioning. We ask Why did this happen to us? and perhaps What could this have meant?; myth fills in the gaps and retraces certain steps so that we arrive at an acceptable solution. These assemblages, besides addressing the semiotic breakdown left by the Real Terror

Baudrillard describes, also suits the rhetorical and corrective purposes of a wartime state. Morale culture is precisely the condition of such compensatory speaking-over, "narratives [that] are sophisticated works officially concocted...to aid morale" (Fussell 36), and at least partly explains the ascendancy of the former World Trade Center into the symbolic epicentre of the makeover movement towards national recovery following 9/11.

The fall of the Twin Towers has become, accordingly, an object of much mythical rendition. That the towers were selected for their spectacular destruction is where any discussion of the World Trade Center's life and afterlife story usually finds itself. It was certainly not the only target of symbolic import, if we extend the terrorists' logic of selection to the attack on the Pentagon and the alleged attempt at destroying the Capitol; nevertheless, it stands out as the preferred metaphor for American Hegemony. In retrospect, Baudrillard suggests, their sheer extremity anticipated their attack:

The collapse of the towers is the major symbolic event. Imagine if they

had not collapsed: the effect would not have been the same at all. The

172 fragility of global power would not have been so strikingly proven. The

towers, which were the emblem of that power, still embody it in their

dramatic end, which resembles a suicide...

Were the Twin Towers destroyed, or did they collapse? Let us be

clear about this: the two towers are both a physical, architectural object

and a symbolic object (symbolic of financial power and global economic

liberalism). The architectural object was destroyed, but it was the

symbolic object which was targeted and which it intended to demolish.

One might think the physical destruction brought about the symbolic

collapse. But in fact no one, not even the terrorists, had reckoned on the

total destruction of the towers. It was, in fact, their symbolic collapse that

brought about their physical collapse, not the other way around. (46-48)

More important, however, are the impressions written over the "irreducible" lack left by the fall of the towers, which underscore exactly the emphatic mythmaking I see taking place in the wake of September 11. Insofar as history is being made around what happened at Ground Zero, it is "emplotted in particular ways"

(Anderson 197). As Benedict Anderson notes, in writing the biography of a nation (or, in the instance of the former World Trade Center, a memorial story-as- national rebuild narrative), what cannot be remembered must be narrated (204).

The business of formulating these master narratives is enabled by the symbolic violence of the sort that felled the Twin Towers; the collapse of the buildings— their symbolic death—is requisite to the creation of its "true" meaning. Much as the French historian Michelet described his work to write a "second life" on behalf

173 of the dead, to "say what they 'really' meant and 'really' wanted, since they themselves 'did not understand'" (Anderson 198), the towers were primed by their destruction to be spoken for. This construction of meaning is the most immediate, noticeable undertaking in the rebuild effort at Ground Zero and streams the symbolic activities at that site into the statist program of creating an official memorial discourse.

It is important to reiterate here the great strategic need for the WTC rebuild as a singular fixation point for mass memorial attention. In the close wake of September 11, Ground Zero was only one of many gathering points for public grieving in the United States (e.g. the Space Needle in Seattle, WA, where I stumbled into a memorial gathering around September 22-23, 2001). People, moved by the loss that at once seemed to equalize and unify the nation (the

"democracy of death"), became inspired to create personal memorials at local sites all over the country. When I visited Ground Zero in the spring of 2003, the site was still populated by individual shrines that captured the early incarnations of a community of mourners:

There is a spiritual allure to being part of an event, because of the horror,

because some people need to connect to people who went through

tragedy. A whole range of emotions are involved, from the most heartfelt

to the most voyeuristic.

We're united in an almost effervescent feeling and exhilaration.

Now something horrible has brought us together. Bereavement may be

174 the only way Americans imagine themselves as one. It trumps all the ways

we're separate, as if tragedy opens a window to an ideal community so far

from the day-to-day reality. And it may be true in a fleeting kind of way.

The harsh reality is that it doesn't last. (Linenthal qtd. in Mitchell n.p.)

It didn't: even at that point the Official History of the event loomed overhead,

made manifest in large temporary plaques placed along the fencing to describe

the events that had culminated in the "murders" that had taken place there.

Since that time, official remembrance, the dominant modus operandi at work in

rebuilding the World Trade Center, has crowded out personal memorials; future

building plans such as those proposed by Arad and Walker further direct the

public/private use of space for grieving by including the Family Room, reserved

for the families of 1993 and 9/11 victims: "The Family Room will house a large

vessel containing unidentified remains, and a nearby alcove will be reserved for

family members who wish to leave commemorative objects behind"

(http://www.proiectrebirth.org/rebuild/architecture/theMemorial.html). The World

Trade Center narrative is the history, the second-life of a changed America, but it

is really an act of restoring the blemished myth of exceptionalism productive to

the States' objectives via the creation of official memory and history;

consequently, the particular importance in the spectacle of the rebuild is its ability to grasp the public's attention and domesticate its emotive responses. Individual feeling and memory, left unfettered, is unpredictable and, therefore, contrary to the territorializing logic of the State; official memory emerges as an acceptable

outlet for public grieving (and grievance). "Of course, the child, the woman, the

175 black [the minoritarian] have memories," Deleuze and Guattari explain, "but the

Memory that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating

them as 'childhood memories,' as conjugal, or colonial memories"15 (293);

because "majority implies a state of domination" (291), not in terms of numbers

but of ideological capital, "[t]here is no history but of the majority, or of minorities

as defined in relation to the majority" (292). Consequently, there is considerable

anxiety on the part of State concerns to colonize memorial spaces as a means of

reterritorializing memory itself. Tellingly, in the absence of any permanent

structure at Ground Zero, a temporary memorial took its place to give the

emptiness of the space itself a physical presence, a visibility: the Tribute in Light,

a WTC memorial launched March 11-April 13, 2003 and each September 11

thereafter from 2003 to 2005, was erected as a temporary memorial to fill up the

void in space and thought between the collapse of the Twin Towers and the

appearance of their successors. The twin beams of light, which rise from Ground

Zero and fill up the spaces on the skyline once taken up by the buildings, ghost

15 Such "minoritarian" roles in memorialization were aptly illustrated by the wrath incurred by an early plan for a firefighters' memorial at the NYFD's Brooklyn headquarters; the statue, which was to be based on a photograph of firefighters Dan McWilliams, George Johnson and Billy Eisengrein raising a U.S. flag at Ground Zero (a photograph that takes advantage of a fairly obvious reference to the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima), was reworked to be more inclusive by replacing the likenesses of the three men in the picture (all of whom are White) with three figures of different races: one would be White, one Black, and one Latino. However, after public outcry over the liberties taken with the facts of the event, the project was scrapped altogether. (Hume n.p.) The original photographic image was later used on a semipostal stamp [one sold at a higher price to raise funds, esp. for charities], with some of the proceeds from its sale going towards FEMA's relief efforts ("Raising the Flag at Ground Zero"). The uproar over the "politically correct" changes to the design underscores at least two basic problems with the construction of civic memory that this particular image and the controversy that ensued around it tease out. First, if three non-White men (or three women, or, if we really wanted to test this hypothetical set, three non-White women) had raised the flag, would people have then actively petitioned against a multiracial/diversified image in the proposed monument? Second, how certain is it that someone would have deemed such an image—that of any minoritarian group raising the flag—as "important" enough to memorialize or even photograph in the first place? 176 the presence of the towers, and while suggesting their continuance also see their transcendence into iconography:

We set out to "repair" and "rebuild" the skyline—but not in a way that

would attempt to undo or disguise the damage. Those buildings are gone

now, and they will never be rebuilt. Instead we would create a link

between ourselves and what was lost. In so doing, we believed, we could

also repair, in part, our city's identity and ourselves.

All the same we saw the work as part of the physical and spiritual

reconstruction efforts.... The reconstruction of the skyline did not have to

be literal. Besides, we wanted our proposal to be a realistic, viable project,

not a fantastical one. We felt an incredible urgency. We wanted the light to

inspire the rescue workers and the city at large and to show the world that

New York was still New York. The international aspect was key: It was the

World Trade Center, after all, and people of many nationalities had

perished there. We even proposed that, in solidarity, similar light towers be

erected in cities around the world: London, Paris, Buenos Aires. The

original towers were destroyed. Now virtual ones would sprout up all over

the world. (Bonevardi n.p.)

Bonavardi's comments about the creation of the Tribute in Light illuminate (pun intended?) the unifying force that the memorial exudes; solidarity is made literal by the virtual memorial, whose symbolic power extends well beyond the national borders. Bonavardi's suggestion of a memorial franchising movement, of Twin

Towers "sprouting up all over," lays bare the colonizing dimension of the 9/11

177 tribute and its underlying role in monopolizing morality. Further, the blatant allusions to religious (specifically Christian) elements—the heavenly ascent, the

"rebirth"—would establish the symbolic direction of later, more permanent designs, so the Tribute in Light, while provisional, would set down by example many of the mythical requirements to be seen in later designs.

While very little (still, I notice, nearing the eighth year of planning) has actually happened at the site in terms of physical reconstruction, its designation as a memorial space was very rapidly established and would direct the planning around the site; furthermore; this use of memorialization would serve the didactic function that Deleuze and Guattari describe as a mnemotechnic. Maarten Hajer similarly observes the compulsory regulations of administered memory, so that

"[a]t a minimum, 'memorial' came to be a compulsory prefix....The metaphor of the 'footprints' stuck in the imagination and solidified when Governor Pataki of

New York, up for re-election, embraced the idea that nothing should be built in the 'footsteps' of the Twin Towers" (452). The necessity of memorializing the space as a piece of sacred ground would script the process of revitalizing the area, and in turn, would turn the national consciousness towards both its recovery (to be achieved through a imitation of normalcy, lest the terrorists win) and the mobilization towards the War on Terror. So, the paradox of building on sacred ground is perhaps less problematic than it first appears; creating an official memorial space in the process of rebuilding also means making the space commercially/economically viable by compounding it with the leading project of a nationalist tribute. With tribute as the necessary inspiration of the project,

178 literalness is the governing force behind the resurrection taking place at Ground

Zero—starting with the notion of Ground Zero as an obliterated space:

Symbolic inscription started immediately as the site was redefined as

"Ground Zero." It expressed the broadly shared feelings of many whose

lives had been shattered. Yet Ground Zero was also a confusing term. It

suggested a need to start from scratch, an annihilation of history. [Hajer's

footnote: The term "Ground Zero" was not "blank, " as it picked up on the

previous meaning of "Ground Zero" as a reference to the Trinity Site, the

place where the first nuclear bombs had been detonated in 1945.] But

while the buildings might have been destroyed, the site was not empty; it

was full of competing meanings. What these meanings were, how these

meanings related to one another, and what significance they had for the

process of rebuilding, was, initially, open and ambivalent. Hence this

planning process was not simply about building volumes, [layout] and

programs; behind it was a much more profound negotiation of the

symbolic meaning of the site. (Hajer 446)

The pronouncement of Ground Zero as an absolute departure point for "starting again" is the locus of a sort of re-absorption: terror, after all, is disastrous not because of the immediate destruction that it leaves in its path but because of the stunned disorganization that the shattering of myth—in this case, the myth of exceptionalism—leaves behind.

To counterpoint the "relevant" destruction of terror and its impact on collective memory, one need only look at what has not been done more recently

179 in New Orleans, where the physical destruction of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 far exceeds the architectural scarring inflicted by the terror attacks. When I visited the city in April 2009, much of the damage was still unremedied; driving through entire neighbourhoods that had been abandoned, I looked out on what could have been the barren aftermath of a nuclear holocaust: blocks of residential and commercial space16 had simply been left to rot, as had many of their former residents and tenants, one could argue. As was widely reported at the onset of the disaster, tens of thousands of people were displaced, most into Mississippi and east Texas; as of June 2009, many of these people have been unable to return, and 20 000 families who lost their homes to the hurricane remain without permanent shelter (Hsu n.p.). The victims of Katrina, mostly the Black working poor (according to 2008 government reports, half the displaced people had not returned and New Orleans's African American population has subsequently declined by 57 percent [Quigley n.p.]), are insignificant compared to the victims of 9/11 because, as Jonathan Vance acknowledges, "Stockbrokers and merchant bankers create large lobby groups (such as the Pentagon Memorial Fund, Take

Back the Memorial, and WTC Families for Proper Burial), but poor urban blacks are easy to ignore" (notes to author 24 Jun 2009). The wrecked landscape left by the disaster and the victims, both living and dead,17 will not be the subject of a

16 One particularly haunting stretch contained an abandoned Wal-Mart, KFC, and hospital in the same block. These had been boarded up and displayed evidence of evolved ecological succession: the hospital, in particular, had been fully overgrown by vegetation. 17 The official death toll for Hurricane Katrina stands now at 1464 (Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals); after reviewing doctors' testimonies before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Robert Lindsay cites an unofficial count reaching somewhere between 1723 and 4098 to include deaths due to various diseases (the result of the hurricane conditions and/or improper disease management as a result of overcrowding and forced migration) ("Final Katrina Death Toll"). 180 makeover because its restoration is irrelevant; on the other hand, September 11,

as an important hurt with important victims, must be rebuilt.

The act of resurrection, of a space and of a state order, relies on absolute

consensus, which is [reconstructed with the exacted application of myth:

In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the

complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does

away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately

visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is

without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it

establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean themselves. (Barthes

143)

In the context of an America emerging from a terror war that was brought to its doorstep, the role of the World Trade Center reconstruction initiative becomes clear: rebuilding, we are assured, is requisite to recovery, and by extension,

moral victory against terror; hence the straightforwardness of the project title

Memory Foundations: memorialization is literalized as the foundation of the architecture, and every structure within this composite is overtly expressive of this fundamental idea. Illustrative of this interpretation of memorial design are the reflecting pools at the centre of Michael Arad and Peter Walker's on-site memorial, Reflecting Absence, which are to be situated in the said footsteps of the former Twin Towers; again there are both the "obvious" transparency of the title and the centrality of literal reminders to be considered, as well as the punctual space designation:

181 On the lowest level, history is preserved. The very foundations of the

World Trade Center, the original box beam column remnants can be

accessed along with the exposed slurry wall. A contemplation room

provides a space for the remains of those lost and never identified and an

adjacent area offers a sacred space for victims' families....As visitors

return above ground to the plaza level, the surrounding trees mediate their

return to daily life.

Michael Arad said, "We have taken the powerful concepts on which

the design is based and working together and listening to countless

numbers of people to whom the success of the memorial is of the utmost

importance, we have refined the design and reinforced its intent. The

memorial will honor all and give us a place to gather, reflect, and find

meaning in the loss that we have all suffered."

(http://www.proiectrebirth.org/rebuild/architecture/memDetails.html)

Arad and Walker describe the design and development of Reflecting Absence as

"poetic and precise," and perhaps there is no better way to describe the plan, which was formulated as an early step in the proposed management of memorial space at Ground Zero. Memorialization is, in so many ways, about the precision that is only allowed through incorporating the "right" poetic pathways, along which all are coerced to travel under the obligation of national self-identity.

Patriotism, enabled and charged by the moral energy that memorialization affords, also stands as an effective theme for the rebuild and its directive of

182 contriving national unity by further narrowing interpretive paths in the "capture of flows" that Deleuze and Guattari describe as a fundamental State task:

It is a vital concern of every State...to control migrations and, more

generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of

the flows... "the political power of the State is polis, police, that is,

management of the public ways...the gates of the city, its levies and

duties, are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the

penetration power of migratory packs." (386)

As the favoured ideological stance in the United States post-September 11 shifted rapidly from that of victim in need to one of motivated avenger, so, too, did the cultural climate and the poetics of the rebuild. Patriotic themes easily found a proper place within the memorialization process, and these asserted themselves transparently within the stated design objectives and their unfolding development. The evolution of what began as the Freedom Tower, renamed 1

World Trade Center in late March 2009 (more on this semantic detail follows below), in particular, exemplifies the thematic gravity of the State translated physically into architecture. Libeskind's original concept for the Ground Zero restoration floated in on the high-mindedness and communal plurality that were inspired by the "democracy of death" born out of the attacks and characterized the early brainstorms for a memorial; his design was selected through a lengthy public competition that invited everyone, regardless of nationality, age, or occupation, to submit entries and included public debates (e.g. "Listening to the

183 City," 2002) and other outreach projects18. While in Libeskind's design there was

one notably American piece to the project, dubbed the Freedom Tower, which

even in its first rendition was meant to parallel the Statue of Liberty, in his words,

its inception was led by his personal affection for the Statue of Liberty and his

memory of seeing it as a new immigrant to America: "I arrived by ship to New

York as a teenager, an immigrant, and like millions of others before me, my first

sight was the Statue of Liberty and the amazing skyline of Manhattan. I have

never forgotten that sight or what it stands for. This is what this project is all

about" (Hajer 459). The then-nameless skyscraper would "conflate the

Declaration of Independence, ecology, and internationalism in the same design.

(The internationalism quickly proved too much...in short order he began referring

to the building as the Freedom Tower)" (Lewis 12). Libeskind's neutrality and

internationalist discourse would nevertheless resonate in the early layout of the

memorial and its components: the International Freedom Center (IFC), the

Drawing Room, the Gardens of the World (which were to be made up of plants

from all over the globe); in later incarnations, however, all of these figures would

be eliminated in favor of more overtly "American" installations in a flurry of moral

panic over the "inappropriateness" of supposedly anti-American elements of the

rebuild. Libeskind, who came under fire for his anti-American literary work,

Fishing from the Pavement, would relinquish control of the Freedom Tower

project to Childs, and later (2004), both the International Freedom Center and the

18 Many critics have since cited this "democratic" thrust behind the design program as an utter failure and the primary cause of the inactivity on-site, including Maarten Hajer; noticeably, in recent years, as the construction continued to stall, the Port Authority has assumed more direct control over the rebuild process in the way of design modifications, especially. 184 Drawing Room were scrapped for considering anti-American art installations.

The Freedom Tower, which began its symbolic life as a portion of a larger community of buildings would emerge under the forced union of Libeskind and

Childs as the icon of the memorial complex. Soon after, the first piece of the construction project to find a permanent home on the site was laid down with great ceremony: the granite cornerstone of the Freedom Tower; that the dedication took place on July 4, 2004 carries an unambiguous reference to

America's Independence Day, as does the Freedom Tower's proposed height of precisely 1776 feet (which has been contested because of security concerns but has been determined—at least at for now—to be too symbolically valuable to change). However, after the emergence of increasing security problems as well as mounting frustration over the rejection of a "Twin Towers 2" model rebuild

(with the most famous of the earlier propositions submitted by Donald Trump), and the subsequent redirection of the design towards more aesthetically conservative lines, its validity has been championed on the strength of its renewed patriotic significance to the reconstruction effort at large:

This more slender tower will ascend to 1,776 feet, iconic, graceful and

resolute. It remains a beacon in the downtown skyline, gesturing now

toward the glowing torch of Lady Liberty, and a focal point around which

other buildings cluster. It presides in a dynamic composition in which the

memorial to those who lost their lives on 9/11 remains the centerpiece

while the new museums, cultural center, plazas and transportation hub

185 contribute their special grace and drama. (Childs quoted in

http://freedomtower.som.com/)

The Freedom Tower/1 WTC now conforms to an appropriately monolithic obelisk design that recalls (maybe unconsciously, maybe not) the Washington

Monument or the Trinity site memorial; while its height, for reasons of semiotic importance that have already been defined, is still planned for 1776 vertical feet, the uppermost 400 feet will be that of a light-emitting antenna to be placed at the top of the building, and its intense beam (not unlike those being used for the

Tribute in Light) will extend over 1000 feet into the night sky. The official

Freedom Tower design site opens with an article on the revised building plans,

"Symbolic Design Speaks to Future; Its Spire is a Beacon of Freedom," which quotes Governor George Pataki at the unveiling of the revamped Freedom Tower plan, specifically his praises for the structural and semiotic improvements that made the new design superior over the original:

Together we faced the challenge of redesigning the Freedom Tower and

today we see the result is a better, safer, and prouder symbol of freedom

for our skyline. This new design reflects a soaring tribute to freedom and a

bedrock commitment to safety and security. The Freedom Tower will not

only be a tremendous icon, it will also be an economic engine generating

thousands of jobs for New Yorkers. David Childs was charged with a

seemingly impossible task - to design a building that serves as a soaring

architectural tribute to liberty; that meets the world's highest life safety

standards; that is a pioneer in environmental quality; and that remains true

186 to Daniel Libeskind's visionary master plan for the World Trade Center

site. David Childs has surpassed these expectations by designing a

building that will be a proud new icon that references great American

symbols of strength and freedom such as the Statue of Liberty and the

Empire State Building. ( http://freedomtower.som.com/)

The incandescent spire, officially christened the Beacon of Freedom, is, according to co-designer David Childs, meant to explain the building as a whole:

"[It is to be] a sculptural beacon of freedom that will send light out to the nation

[and an] exclamation point"

(http://www.proiectrebirth.org/rebuild/architecture/freedom.html). Libeskind elaborates upon his project partner's sentiment, asserting that "the torch is what it's about—a central point, and at its foot the grand memorial"

(http://www.proiectrebirth.org/rebuild/architecture/freedom.html), and Mayor

Bloomberg similarly alludes to the symbolic power of the beacon: "For generations to come, the Freedom Tower will be a symbol of New Yorkers' resolve and a powerful beacon of freedom to people around the world"

(http://freedomtower.som.com/). The Freedom Tower, it seems, now makes sense, aesthetically and symbolically because of the Beacon of Freedom, which makes the Freedom Tower evocative of quintessential Americanness:

A mast containing an antenna for the Metropolitan Television Alliance

(MTVA), designed by a collaboration of architects, artists, lighting

designers and engineers, and secured by a system of cables, rises from a

circular support ring, similar to Liberty's torch, to a height of 1,776 feet. In

187 keeping with the original design, the entire composition evokes the Statue

of Liberty's torch and will emit light, becoming its own Beacon of Freedom.

(http://freedomtower.som.com/)

The antenna now fully encapsulates the logic of the Freedom Tower's patriotic

design, and as Bender the robot says in Futurama, antenna logic is one that you

have to be a robot or a man to understand ("I, Roommate"); as I am neither, I can

only speculate that the Beacon's role in the mediated restoration of confidence

and historical significance in the project has a lot to do with its "readiness," as a

singularly conspicuous figure in the otherwise now-politically inert appearance of

the architectural project, to accept a mythical load that suits the strengthened

pro-American imperatives of the project. From the hemorrhaging of the Beacon

of Freedom into the "rebirth" at Ground Zero as a whole, it is a short distance from there to the proliferation of meaning from the spectacle of the rebuild and its final result. A point of collective fixation, the Beacon is a means of normalizing

public attention; hence its function as a political technology and the key to its synechdochic meaningfulness in the Ground Zero rebuild: it isolates the State organization that Foucault suggests is the end product of a "general recipe for the exercise of power over men: the mind as a surface of inscription for power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through the control of ideas"

(Discipline 102). In this case, the central theme is nationalistic unity—"being Us or, at the very least, With Us"—which in the current political atmosphere is the very singularity of the War on Terror.

188 The symbolism motoring the rebuild project to make over Ground Zero and the ideological capital to be had from chronicling the makeover's gains appear straightforward enough, but given a few monumental developments the past two weeks (I write these words in late May 2009, and some of the major directional shifts in the WTC project that I refer to are now less than two weeks old), it seems appropriate now to recommend a playful reversal that makes an old cautionary statement new again: it works well in practice, but does it work in theory? It was always transparent that the WTC would be rebuilt, despite a noisy minoritarian movement against this resurrection; it has also been obvious overall what the legal, practical, and even some psychological limitations of the rebuild exercise would be—the costs, tenancies, and other empirical quantities were

"known," at least initially. The timelines were measured expertly around the realpolitik of New York real estate speculation as well as concrete concerns around raising funds and completing insurance assessments. And, of course, the hastened mobilization of the country towards an overseas war effort would require the proper reinforcement of nationalistic mythology through history and its tendency, as Foucault famously noted, to be "in our time...that which transforms documents into monuments" (Archaeology 7). All these clear-cut guidelines, as it turns out, were laid out early for a transformative spectacle—more appropriately, the transformation that would set the tone for the post-9/11 recovery—that has not yet taken place. While one building, 7 World Trade Center, was completed in

2006 at a cost of $700 million, most of its rental units remain vacant; moreover, the building was really part of the periphery of the reconstruction effort and its

189 completion attracted little attention alongside the promises made about its more high-profile architectural siblings. Aside from the redrawing of the Memory

Foundations memorial project and the acrimony over the interpretation of the

Freedom Tower/1 World Trade Center already covered, new complications have arisen, each bringing with it a pronounced degree of public controversy. The

Reflecting Absence pools have been the target of public criticism due to the exorbitance of their cost (with the structures costing no less than $500 million and maintenance expenses projected at $40 million annually, if built it will be the most expensive memorial ever); its subterranean design and inclusion of the slurry wall installation, both of which have been labelled morbid and depressing; and the positioning of names, with the suggested "democratic" arrangement19 of victims' names in alphabetical order causing resentment among members and families of both the New York police and fire departments, who are petitioning for separate places on site for lost workers and the clear display of ranks and affiliations beside all their names (Sontag n.p.).

The most contentious developments, as expected, have occurred over the flagship building, the Freedom Tower, whose name was formerly changed to 1

In their design statement for the memorial competition, Michael Arad and Peter Walker explicated the democratic thrust behind the randomized distribution of names: The names of the deceased will be arranged in no particular order around the pools. After carefully considering different arrangements, I have found that any arrangement that tries to impose meaning through physical adjacency will cause grief and anguish to people who might be excluded from that process, furthering the sense of loss that they are already suffering. The haphazard brutality of the attacks is reflected in the arrangement of names, and no attempt is made to impose order upon this suffering. The selfless sacrifices of rescue workers could be acknowledged with their agency's insignia next to their names. Visitors to the site, including family members and friends of the deceased, would be guided by on-site staff or a printed directory to the specific location of each name. For those whose deceased were never physically identified, the location of the name marks a spot that is their own. (LMDC Memorial Competition Site)

190 World Trade Center to improve its leasability (Kokenes n.p.); while the name change caused local uproar, an earlier and considerably more embarrassing blunder—the removal of the twenty-ton Freedom Tower cornerstone (which does not fit the new, more "secure" base design of the building) and quiet return to its donors (Perez n.p.)—was, conversely, handled with exact enough discretion to escape public notice. Proportionally, the successes for 1 WTC have not yet managed to outshine its challenges; the last update on April 20, 2009 of the building's construction approximated its height at 173 feet

(http://www.panynj.gov/wtcprogress/video-gallery.html). In sum, the seemingly endless queue of alterations has meant that all bets are off as far as the opening expenditure and timeline estimates are concerned: at this time, the predicted cost remains an unknown quantity, with estimates ranging anywhere from $20 billion to $100 billion; the timeline is similarly uncertain, but the more cautious projections cite a full completion date of 2037—over a quarter-century beyond the earlier aim of September 11, 2011.

Crowning the litany of failures plaguing the WTC makeover progress is the latest remodelling of the master construction plan. Released May 11, 2009 by the Port Authority, the new design calls for the complete removal of one of the properties, 5 World Trade Center, and the "stumping" of 2 and 3 World Trade

Center from the proposed heights of 79 and 78 storeys, respectively, to a mere four storeys apiece; these alterations have been described as necessitated by the conditions created by both administrative conflicts (specifically those between developer Larry Silverstein, who is leasing the property, and the publicly funded

191 Port Authority, from which Silverstein expects supportive revenue to build and lease the space) and the current economic recession, which has kept prospective tenants away. The modifications, which represent the most extreme changes yet to the design plan, will likely not be the last if the pattern of performance for the

WTC rebuild is taken as an indication; however, these shifts are outstanding in their exhibition of the disconnection between the private hegemonic aims towards writing the script of history along usable formulae and the public's inherent tendency towards undoing its contrived unification to become disorganized, entropic, and indiscernible. Dump-like once more in its release from disciplinary assemblages, it asserts its own powers of deterritorialization,

its lines of flight, its smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new

earth. The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable

character of the quantities that confront one another...War machines

[groups not fully captured by the State and its multifarious apparatuses of

control] take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine

and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear

against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.

(Deleuze and Guattari 423)

The material failures witnessed around the faltering rebuild project at the former

World Trade Center hints at the true nature of the "unspecified enemy" as it assumes its most dangerous shape, not as the figure of the terrorist at the borders but the saboteur within who sees the artifice of the dominant order and draws a line of flight out of it. The function of myth is constructed in direct

192 opposition to this object of escape, so that, unified, the packs can be managed through their shared consistencies; the resultant mass, what can be (and has been) approximated as the nation is "the very operation of a collective subjectification, to which the modern State corresponds as a process of subjection" (Deleuze and Guattari 456). While its resurrective makeover has been and continues to be troubled by disputes over the realities of cosmetics, finances, and public opinion, the adherence of the World Trade Center project to this grounding principle remains unrelenting. Hence the continued imperative for the promise of the reveal, if not the reveal itself, to sanitize a nation's reading of itself and, through this concentration of perspective, unify the population in a morale culture typified by purpose, outrage, and moral righteousness: the end product would be a collective made readier to fight the War on Terror and, most important, to obey whatever orders were offered to expedite this outcome—not what Minoru Yamasaki meant when he declared his intention for the WTC to be a monument to "the cooperation of men," perhaps, but in a way (albeit a distorted way) a renewal of the World Trade Center's commitment to its creator's idea through its reconceptualization as tribute.

193 Chapter Five

Passengers Only: Mastery of Flight 93's Myth through Heroic Narrative

The ninth episode of Season Four, the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, a

sitcom whose raison d'etre is to generate very uncomfortable comedic moments,

features a double entendre-loaded episode entitled "The Survivor" in which some

of the more obnoxious characters in the series inadvertently test the rhetorical

limits of September 11 mythmaking simply by being themselves. After the series'

protagonist "misuses" the expression "Let's Roll"—the now-ubiquitous slogan for

the Global War on Terror that was derived from Flight 93 lore—another character

tries to challenge his entitlement to such a reference. "You knew my brother-in-

law died on September 11th!" the latter cries. "How dare you say something like

that!" The protagonist counters this objection by reminding the man attacking

him that the victim in question was killed by a bike courier uptown and was

nowhere near the World Trade Center collapse: "Oh, I didn't know, I didn't know

that if you, that if you, you died uptown on 9/11 that it was, that it was part of it,

uh... the tragedy." Despite the men's mutual and violent repudiations, their

arguments and the whole ridiculous exchange they are engaged in work to tell the same joke, and this joke turns out to be a relatively dangerous one because it

alludes to the very real rhetorical superiority of the 9/11 myth, and specifically, to the transformative energy that the myth has over the creation and

comprehension of memory. There is much to be gained, it turns out, simply from

knowing and telling the right stories; done "right," myth dominates and becomes

194 the touchstone for evaluating the validity of any new information. In mentioning the death of his brother-in-law and September 11 in the same sentence, the angry man succeeds in using the second event to modify how the first is received, and his very obvious (and possibly deliberate) mix-up in meaning becomes insufficient grounds for questioning his authority as a victim—just one of the eponymous "survivors" of the comedic episode—on the matter. So, this episode must be taken not just as a farce but as a warning piece of satire, for aside from a few cheap guffaws to be had over the matched stupidity of two obstinate characters, the joke also delivers a self-conscious and potentially sobering case study of post-9/11 storytelling and its larger, lingering moral implications.

It is the intense emotional upheaval present in wartime that creates the conditions for mythmaking in historicization to be exerted most transparently and, consequently, why war so dramatically raises the stakes for myth and the storytelling that brings myth into existence. The imperatives of nation-building in its various iterations—nationalism, patriotism, even outright jingoism and xenophobia—demand that all invested interpretations work in the same direction, namely towards re-establishing certain tenets of understanding self and other. It is precisely because war creates profuse opportunities for challenging these ideas that myth is immediately useful in assuaging any doubts or dissonant movements. When a community feels most vulnerable, it insists on its security.

Victimization becomes heroism, aggression becomes righteous vengeance, collateral damage becomes invisible: as the gaps between the ideal and the real

195 continue to surface, myth works overtime to fill them in constructively.

Collectively, such beliefs, so necessary for the moral energy of wartime, are referred to by George Mosse as the Myth of the War Experience, which was

"designed to mask and legitimize the war experience; it was meant to displace the reality of war...and [project] the traditional belief in martyrdom and resurrection onto the nation as an all-encompassing civic religion" (7). Benedict

Anderson takes the overlap in thought between religion and nationalist myths, including those of wartime (perhaps especially those of wartime), a step further still by positing that these two varieties of "imagined communities" share an

"affinity [that] is by no means fortuitous," one that is grounded in death:

The great merit of traditional religious world-views (which naturally must

be distinguished from their role in the legitimation of specific systems of

domination and exploitation) has been their concern with man-in-the-

cosmos, man as species being, and the contingency of life. The

extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Christianity or

Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative

response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering—disease,

mutilation, grief, age, and death. Why was I born blind? Why is my best

friend paralyzed? Why is my daughter retarded? The religions attempt to

explain....At the same time, in different ways, religious thought also

responds to obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming

fatality into continuity...

196 ...With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part

composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes

fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another

style of continuity more necessary. What then was a secular

transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning...few

things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation....It is the

magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. (11-12)

Myth, as the method of motivated explanation of "unexplainable" phenomena common to religion and nationalism, is an organizational device whose object is to reset a collective and its definitions against the threat of chaotic heterogeneity and meaninglessness; again, in the case of war, when the schema of national identity is challenged by the opportunistic surges of the insubordinate

"Unspecified Enemy" (defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A

Thousand Plateaus as "unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines...'multiform, maneuvering and omnipresent...of the moral, political, subversive or economic order, etc.," the unassignable material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms" [422]), it becomes necessary to restore a structural integrity to nationhood by capturing and unmaking these diffuse, antagonistic energies to restore a secure unity. When dealing with storytelling and war, then, the resultant heroic narrative is, "virtually by definition...hostile to two notions that most historians take for granted: that controversy is inherent in any ongoing process of historical interpretation, and

197 that policy making is driven by multiple considerations and imperatives....Heroic narratives demand a simple, unilinear story line" (Dower 80). A further advantage to the conservation of the heroic narrative in wartime and its univocality is precisely the energetic "faith" in the struggle to reterritorialize, such that any criticism of the master story is read as threatening to wartime myth

(namely, as unknown and, therefore, exterior to the collective); in such a context, even to question heroism is to be unpatriotic—to speak blasphemy in the civic religion of war.

The use of religious or even cultist analogues to describe the level of commitment that war culture—any war culture—has towards its own storytelling loses much of its extremity when one looks at the heroic myths of the current War on Terror. Even a superficial examination of what "happened" on September 11 speaks to the kind of collective psychic disruption that makes the act of official commemoration necessary: for the larger arch-narratives of self-knowledge, such as those of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, to prevail, memories of the war have to be domesticated. In the case of an unfinished war, particularly one in which there have been few substantiated victories or material gains, the need for commemorative agreement, and for the mythmaking responsible for creating the requisite consensus—"the movement...towards myth, towards a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant...[i]n short, towards fiction" (Fussell 131)—is especially great.

198 The heroic narrative, specifically the storytelling that arrives in the wake of a major disruption to national self-understanding, can count on finding agreement when it comes to contemplating death (that is, of those on "our" side, within community borders). If the taboo of speaking ill of the dead is active at the individual level, then this imperative sees a multiplying effect in wartime, when the relevant dead are all considered heroes, sacrificial lambs, or both.

Remembering the Fallen, then, is itself a tributary into the establishment of the nation-building narratives post-trauma, for, as George Mosse notes, "without the war dead there would [be] no myth at all"; the fallen, not the living, inspire the collective memory in order to "regenerate a defeated nation" (72-73). Here the

Aristotelian understanding of the tragedy being the pathway to catharsis—an emotional purging—aids in explaining the performative role of commemoration in national heroic narratives; the primacy of what Marita Sturken refers to as a cultural memory—in this case, one that as reverse-engineered tragedy streams into the appropriately nationalistic social script of wartime—herds people into a productive uniformity [not "unity" as it is understood in the narratives themselves, but the kind of oneness that rolls over oppositional, dissonant understandings]:

[There is] a desire to know what the image defers and...the fantasy of

bearing witness. The question How did they [the dead] react to imminent

death? Becomes How would I react in the face of death? This desire and

the fantasies it produces are components of cultural memory....

Ironically, though, the image that allows the public to feel as though

it participated in the event does not aid us in mourning. Rather we invest it

199 with a truth it cannot reveal. It is the re-enactment, the replaying, the

fantasizing of the story that allow the mourning process to proceed and the

event to acquire meaning. (36-37)

Telling the story of the fallen war dead, as a social, public activity, demands a specific kind of emotional involvement on the part of the collective. As noted earlier, the conservatism that dictates that we treat death with a prescribed reverence all but guarantees that the consequent memory will be unanimous and compatible with a heroic script (because it is "unreasonable" to argue anything against it—e.g. one would be considered unpatriotic or even treasonous speaking ill of the war dead). By mediating the figures of the Fallen (or even their mention) in this manner, the story of the dead is fitted into the Procrustean bed of war mythology; "national trauma...can be smoothed over and subsumed into the narrative of patriotic sacrifice" (Sturken, Tangled Memories 37), and what starts as a moment of national identity crisis becomes a means of initiating the reinstatement of preferred national meanings.

The cultural regulations that govern relationships with the dead are fundamental to the process of massaging the losses of war into a heroic myth and to what James Young refers to as the "administering [of] memory" (124) at memorial sites. The war memorial, as a space for contemplating the fallen, lays down certain rules for how this contemplation should take place and determines what memories are generated. In exploring how the "significance of our relationship to the site of our memory for 'our memory'" is approached by contemporary artists, Young suggests,

200 The grounds for this relationship [are] not just the declared regulations of

the museum but...the undeclared regulations implicit in any memorial

installation that necessarily govern our experiences in their spaces...

unstated though no less powerful rules for remembrance: its veneration of

the object, of the hallowed ground in telling the story of itself. (124)

So, against the promise of a "freedom of personal interpretation"

(http://www.honorflight93.org/memorial/architect/memorial-expression.cfm) or some like personal encounter with the commemorative space, the memorial is deeply invested in the right interpretation, which in the case of the war memorial is almost exclusively a heroic, self-aggrandizing version of events. Noticing this application of heroic myth, Jonathan Vance argues that "virtually every...war memorial can be considered a patriotic memorial (to use Antoine Prost's phrase), one whose inscription renders a value judgment on the sacrifice" (29).

In the context of the War on Terror and its numerous nationalist storytelling contributions, the story of Flight 93 and its Fallen manages to stand out for its faithfulness to the aforementioned heroic master narratives. While the idea of democratic heroism is a fixture in post-9/11 national myth, how it gets played out in the rendering of the Flight 93 story is exceptional in its insistence that, as one movie catch-phrase puts it, "40 ordinary people sat down as strangers and stood up as one" (United 93, my emphasis). While other

September 11 scenarios find many people inadvertently transformed into heroes, the emphasis in the Flight 93 official narrative is placed on the democratic process(es) that made "ordinary" passengers into heroes—among the first in the

201 struggle against Terror and the model for the Perfect Democracy that said struggle would later be touted as defending. George W. Bush's speech to the

New Hampshire Air National Guard and National Guard members on October 9,

2003 captures succinctly the official heroic angle of the transformative event:

Let us also remember that the first victory in this war came on a hijacked

plane bound for the nation's capital. Somehow the brave men and women

on Flight 93, knowing they would die, found the courage to use their final

moments to save the lives of others .. . Few are called to show the kind of

valor seen on Flight 93, or on the field of battle. Yet all of us do share a

calling: Be strong in adversity and unafraid in danger. (Department of

State transcript)

It is, depending on the version encountered, The Flight That Fought Back, The

Plane That Fought Back, The Flight of Valor, or United 93—the flight that held the first battle between patriotic Americans and terrorists, whose invocation says at least as much about nationalistic desires as it does about the facts of the case. It is for so many reasons not simply the story of September 11 but the story of

America itself, with a reiteration of the myths of a post-9/11 culture seeking to recapture its systems of self-understanding representing a pivotal but single stage in the bildungsroman of the life of the nation.

Any facts about the events that took place on Flight 93, as it turns out, are relatively sparse. The 9/11 Commission Report, whose extended title proclaims it as the "final report of the national commission on terrorist attacks upon the

United States," provides little detail beyond the transcontinental flight path of the

202 plane (the plane departed from Newark, NJ and was headed for San Francisco,

CA before it crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania) (33), a timeline of the flight

(33) that summarizes more detailed descriptions in preceding sections entitled

"The Battle for United 93" (10-14) and "United Airlines Flight 93" (28-31), and a piece addressing the rumoured defensive shootdown of Flight 93, "United 93 and the Shootdown Order" (40-46), which is the longest uninterrupted portion of the report that deals with the flight. A transcript of the cockpit recordings was also made public in 2006. There is also (at the time of this writing) considerable dispute over the few basic facts that are available; for example, some passengers' phone calls reported three hijackers, while the final report assumes there were four, and it was unclear to the commission much of the time who was saying or doing what on the plane—the report presumes that the hijacker who had logged the most flight hours prior to boarding Flight 93, Ziad Jarrah, flew the plane following the takeover, but only commits to stating that he "probably" did so

(during the investigation, there were serious doubts circulating that Jarrah was even one of the terrorists because he did not fit the profile20; the debate around

Jarrah's involvement has quieted down due to the October 2006 release of materials linking him to the other terrorists and the Hamburg Cell). The

Commission Report also expresses uncertainty over whether there was an intended fifth hijacker for the flight, suggesting only that "[t]he operative likely intended to round out the team for [Flight 93], Mohamed al Kahtani, had been

20 As Zarrah came from a wealthy and secular background, was educated in the west (Hamburg, Germany), had close ties to his family and friends, and was engaged to be married, his profile deviated from that of the "typical" terrorist. His family maintains that he was an innocent victim of Flight 93, not one of the perpetrators (Neuffer, n.p.) 203 refused entry by a suspicious immigration inspector at Florida's Orlando

International Airport in August" (11). In light of the conspicuously limited pool of confirmed material details, Barthes's observation that myth relies not on the facts themselves but on the inflexion or distortion of these (129), which is echoed by

Sturken's assertion that the image doesn't directly aid in mourning, becomes useful in seeing another possibility in play, namely, that the unavailability of facts is, in fact, conducive to mythmaking. Fewer facts means fewer restrictions on what shapes the Flight 93 myth can take and what kind of imaginative and cultural spaces it occupies, so, far from observing the "required" parsimony in objectively recounting the events, the heroic narrative appears, in fact, to grow theatrically as a way to speak over the void. Paul Virilio goes so far as to proclaim "an abolition of the appearance of facts" the first ruse of war:

From now on the defeat of facts [la defaite des faits] precedes that of

arms: it is less important today to come up with a brilliant manoeuvre, an

intelligent tactic, than strategically to cover up information, genuine

knowledge, by a process of dissimulation or of disinformation that is less

special effect, a known [avere] lie, than the very abolition of the principle of

truth [verite]. (Desert Screen 124)

It is because of a significant information vacuum that the Flight 93 myth enjoys the richness of development that cannot be afforded the stories of the other doomed September 11 flights. Even while Flight 93 exists interwoven into the greater nation-building narratives of September 11, it maintains a space of its own in terms of how it manages to reference (albeit indirectly) an older myth in

204 the American nationalist tradition: the fight story, or more specifically, the frontier battle. The frontier space and its attendant tensions (between the civilized and uncivilized, rational and irrational—or, more simply, Us and the Them(s) of the pre-colonized territory) set the stage for the "right" kind of cathartic struggles at the national level. The national community finds both its identity and its borders reinforced against the threat of other and contamination that is always looming at its limits; hence, the ideological stakes in this battle are proportionally high, and only a story that promises Our victory ensures an unproblematic rendering of nationhood. Margaret Atwood, in her discussion of the American national character in Survival, refers to the frontier space as the key symbol in America:

It suggests a place that is new, where the old order can be discarded...a

line that is always expanding, taking in or "conquering" ever-fresh virgin

territory (be it The West, the rest of the world, outer space, Poverty, or The

Regions of the Mind); it holds out a hope, never fulfilled but always

promised, of Utopia, the perfect human society.

While Atwood is interested in the significance of the frontier in American literature, only minimal effort in extending this logic is required to see how the frontier space suffuses other modes of popular storytelling, and how the gap between "the promise and the actuality," which Atwood proposes that American literature is constantly invested in, plays a more expansive role in the brand of self-understanding that the frontier myth, in its frequent renditions, promotes in the heroic narrative. The story of Flight 93, and its brand of wartime heroics, is a contemporary form of the frontier myth; it attests to both its ubiquity in American

205 war culture and its relevance to the current Utopian project of constructing a myth that coincides with post-9/11 nation-building.

As the Flight 93 memorial itself remains incomplete at the time of this writing, a reasonable prologue to the Flight 93 story to take in its place would be the website dedicated to the national tribute site currently being planned for the

Shanksville, Pennsylvania site, which features on its home page a trinity of key pages—The Story, The Memorial, The Campaign—threaded together with the mission statement that appears directly below: "A Common Field One Day...A

Field of Honor Forever" (attributed to Capt. S. Ruda, LAFD). That the statement appears twice on the same page is less important than how this description of the crash site is clearly meant to articulate the transformative nature of the crash and, by extension, the memorial that would succeed it. The pages, too, suggest stages of a transformation; specifically, the movement from story to memorial to campaign hints at an ascent, to be achieved by reading the said passages in their intended order. By crafting this structure, the site lays down the parameters that are to contain the narrative; right away, the limits are set on what is to be remembered and interpreted—and how. As one cemetery designer explains,

"Beauty is order" (Grassel qtd. in Mosse 88), and the expression works backwards as well, algebraically: order is beauty, acceptability, security.

The opening comments on the memorial home page, which immediately welcome the visitor to the site, further determine the "right" reading. The day of the crash is to become "Forever Remembered," as the first heading promises,

206 and the Flight 93 memorial organization is unambiguous about the memory that its tribute seeks to transmit:

On September 11, 2001, shortly after terrorists flew airplanes into the

Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, the

forty passengers and crewmembers on United Airlines Flight 93

fought a battle in the sky over Pennsylvania. These forty heroes won

their battle against terrorists and thwarted a planned attack on our

nation's capital, saving countless numbers of lives, but sacrificing their

own in a field just east of Pittsburgh, in Somerset County,

Pennsylvania.

The story of Flight 93 is a national treasure — a story of hope

in human courage and cooperation. When confronted with the gravity

of their situation, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 chose to act

heroically and sacrifice their lives for their country. These 40 heroes

made a democratic decision to fight back against terrorism and

thereby thwarted a planned attack on our nation's capital, saving

countless numbers of lives.

These passages outline The Story as it will be realized in the memorial: a heroic fable about democracy, vigilance, and sacrifice enacted in a "battle in the sky."

Read as a commemorative story, both the battle narrative and the work of the resulting memorial efforts as a source of moral energy become clearer still.

Controlling the story means assuming control of the memory and reinstating a clear-cut myth of exceptionalism so crucial to national self-understanding, one

207 that supports Paul Fussell's observation that "[o]ne of the legacies of [a] war is

just this habit of simple distinction, simplification, and opposition. If truth is the

main casualty in war, ambiguity is another...[this] habit derived from the war had

the power to shape later recall not just of the whole war but of its tiniest incidents"

(80).

In Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin collapses the meanings ascribed to

war after the fact and the distinctly American fight story more fully, such that

there is no appreciable distinction made between the wartime heroic narrative

and the war itself:

War [is] the supreme expression of American values, in which the society

"as one man" assumes the moral burden of a struggle (on the grandest

scale) for justice and against a great evil, submerges petty and individual

concerns in a collective and patriotic effort, and in pursuit of victory

develops, organizes, and directs the full potential of the American political

and economic system. (500)

Against Slotkin's description of war as a mode of American mythmaking, Flight

93 is hardly an isolated case of a single memorable fight that defined the War and the nation that would rise to the occasion of that war; rather, it becomes just one footnote in the long story of the American battle against the hostile

Otherness of a frontier that is always moving outwards but which has been and remains a constant in how the nation defines itself and its citizens. Thus, a

"subjugation paradigm" (Slotkin 497) is securely in place regardless of where the war and its myths are directed; its defining characteristic is the belief that "in a

208 frontier society, someone has to impose a semblance of justice and order"

(Slotkin 495). In other words, whenever deterritorialization rears its ugly head in the form of terrorism, revolt, or some other movement hostile to the State's apparatuses of control, a fight story becomes a convenient way to redraw important boundaries. In the case of the War on Terror, the fight for Flight 93 situates its actors on the first site of the new Good War between the "homeland" of democracy and freedom and the irrational savagery that rages on its borders.

Thus, terrorism becomes a rebranding of the catch-all label for the un-American counterinsurgency (i.e. for what would have been represented by "savages" or

Communists in previous conflicts).

Evidence of the kind of garrison mentality that Slotkin's work describes is certainly abundant enough in a war memorial story such as that constructed around Flight 93. The "battle in the sky" evolves out of the familiar tension between Us and a Them whose "resistance to the imposition of a 'progressive' regime is presumed to be irrational and hence not subject to negotiation" (Slotkin

493), this time with the villainy taking the form of amorphous Terror. It has been decided that there were four terrorists onboard Flight 93 (although as previously mentioned the final count is still being debated), and what they did is taken to be understood as indisputable fact [that they hijacked the plane and intended to fly it into the US Capitol Building]. However, when it comes to the memorial story, the hijackers are not mentioned at all; their violence is suggested through the description of the organized counterattack that is presumed to have led to the flight missing its target, but the terrorists themselves have been erased once their

209 catalystic role has been fulfilled. No information is given about their identities, and they are not counted amongst the passengers. The damnatio memoriae against the four hijackers—their removal from the record entirely—attests to their assigned position as non-persons within the context of the memory. Besides their marginal, palimpsestic role in initiating the battle, the perpetrators are the object of an organized amnesia. The final count is always forty—that is, the forty- four people on the plane less the terrorists. As John Dower notes in "Three

Narratives of Our Humanity," the process of quantifying victimization, "involve[s] an almost sacred numerology" (79), with the "favoured imagined numbers...gain[ing] an almost talismanic power" (80), a process that is in this particular case facilitated by the auspiciousness of the number forty (i.e. its connection to the Judeo-Christian tradition). In the Flight 93 story are the forty ordinary citizens turned heroes; they are the forty pictures and the forty names that are the foundation of the commemorative effort directed towards the fate of

Flight 93 (http://www.honorflight93.org/story/passengers-crew.cfm). In the design of the proposed memorial, they will be represented by the forty wind chimes that hang over in the Tower of Voices: "The sounds of chimes in the wind are a living memory of the 40 persons who are honored; many of whose last contact was through their voices" (http://www.honorflight93.org/memorial/design/tower-of- voices.cfm). The forty groves of forty trees that enclose the tellingly named

Sacred Ground further mythologize the Group of Forty and their posthumous

Perfect Democracy. Naturally, the fact that that the hijackers are not entitled to, say, a grove or a wind chime lauding their actions on the flight is in no way

210 surprising, but their orchestrated absence from the story—in which a celebrated heroism emerges in opposition to their attack—is testimonial to the level of sanitization necessary to socialize observers in the right version of things.

Literally and metaphorically, they just don't count when it comes to the heroic narrative; they are but mere props in the heroic epic of Flight 93.

For those counted in the favoured imagined forty of Flight 93, on the other hand, their position as war dead is again of central importance to the myth of

Flight 93 as it is for all war mythology. The notion of sacrifice is invoked consistently throughout the story and the memorial itself as a means of giving sense to an otherwise apparently senseless act. Paul Virilio asserts in Desert

Screen that terrorism, political extremism, and extreme sport are all extensions of the tragic stage in that they "obviat[e] death" by practicing a certain brand of exhibitionism, "the vertigo of both a jump into the void and a dive into the imaginary, the collective unconscious of a nonetheless solitary manifestation"

(29). Likewise, it is through individual insecurity—learned feelings around death and anonymity—that the story of Flight 93 appeals to the collective recital of a heroic script. It is not merely a fear of dying that the myth addresses and counters but the fear of the meaninglessness of one's death—that the loss fulfilled no purpose and, consequently, neither had the life that preceded it: something has to be done with the heroic narrative to explain away how death is an act of generosity and turn the Fallen into a "regenerative function" of the myth:

"The expectation of an eternal and meaningful life—the continuation of a patriotic mission—not only seemed to transcend death itself, but also inspired life before

211 death" (Mosse 78). When the victims' largely accidental involvement is treated as a sacrifice, the myth works to transform the living as well as the dead, such that "[t]he fallen became a part of the comradeship of the living, rejuvenating the nation through those best fitted to collaborate in this awesome task, through those who...survived" (Mosse 79).

The role assigned to the fallen as...heroes [is] crucial for their symbolic

value. But the fallen as symbols would [have] much less impact if it were

not for the public spaces and memorials which [bear] witness to their

deeds and their heritage. The purpose which the fallen [are] made to

serve [is] given true meaning when their resting places [become] shrines

of worship and when monuments erected in their honor [become] the

focus of the public's attention. The fallen are transformed into symbols

which people [can] see and touch and which [make] their cult come alive

(Mosse 80).

The visitor-as-survivor, as the product of the memorial's transformative qualities, attests to the expanded consensus that the remembrance of the fallen stimulates and to a "theology of war" that is meant to apply people's faith to (and unite them through) national wartime ideals, so that

[i]t was almost redundant to include such overt references to the obligation

to the fallen. Everyone knew that the monument symbolized a

commitment to keep the faith, so there was little need to write it in stone or

bronze. The war memorial [is] a didactic object that at once instructed

212 passers-by in the values of the war and affirmed the town's desire to

ensure that those values were passed on. (Vance 210)

Remembrance here is meant to refit the definition of the community to familiar and, as memorial discourse characteristically assumes, lasting conventions of

"the versus habit" (Fussell's expression), so that future generations, despite being removed from the context(s) of the event being commemorated, can expect to be versed in the "correct" impressions regarding past events. The democracy of death assumes a uniform moral sensibility in the treatment of the dead (with exceptional reverence reserved for the war dead), and its transformation into a generalized, communal statement that makes the encounter with any memorial conditional for the visitor, to the extent that "[i]t is not too much to suggest that the [memorial] was intended to shame people into pausing to consider whether their lives were worthy of the high example set by the fallen soldiers" (Vance 211).

The engineered poetic unity of the physical elements of the Flight 93 memorial is additional testimony to the democracy set up to be realized between the dead and the surviving. The original design revealed on September 7, 2005 by architects Paul and Milena Murdoch had the working title "Crescent of

Embrace," which featured the forty memorial groves literally hugging the perimeter of the crash site. After a heated debate emerged over the supposedly

"Islamophilic" properties of the design (its crescent shape and the alleged orientation of its embracing "arms" towards Mecca), the Murdochs changed the

213 Crescent to The Bowl in order to placate public criticism while continuing—maybe even enhancing the image of the unifying embrace:

The Bowl's outline commemorates the collective acts of courage by 40

passengers and crew of Flight 93 with 40 groves of Red and Sugar Maple

trees, referred to as the 40 Memorial Groves, in curving embrace of the

Bowl's open space as it descends to the Sacred Ground.

(http://www.honorflight93.org/memorial/design/the-bowl.cfm)

The theme of unity that informs the space of the memorial site connects the living with the dead and the land with the monument, as the description of the Bowl points out:

The memorial design expresses the union of the land's beauty and power

with the strength and sacrifice of the heroes of Flight 93 by marking the

Flight Path as it breaks the circular continuity of the Bowl edge at the Entry

Portal and the Sacred Ground, where the crash occurred. The location of

the temporary memorial will be recognized. Visitors will be allowed to

leave tributes in niches in the sloped walls of the new Sacred Ground

plaza and written comments at the visitor center.

(http://www.honorflight93.org/memorial/design/the-bowl.cfm)

The circle of the Bowl is embracing, perhaps, but not indiscriminately so. The circle is also meant to close out, and as the controversy over the supposed

Islamic design quirks made obvious, the Flight 93 memorial space will not tolerate elements that are unfriendly to its heroic definitions; it dictates the terms of understanding the site, and by extension, the story of the Flight. In its

214 juxtapositions between the memorial and its surroundings, it embraces and releases, joins the temporary with the permanent, permits the living to converse with the dead, and, in constructing peace for the Fallen, reminds those still standing what the fight is about and why it needs to continue.

The natural setting of the Bowl and aligned elements of the Flight 93 memorial, beyond making a topographical virtue of necessity, also exploits the assumed beauty and goodness of nature to "take the sting out of death" (Mosse

88). George Mosse, in exploring the development of war cemeteries, notes that the number of dead buried in them necessitated the incorporation of parks or park-like spaces (simply because huge tracts of land had to be taken up by them) but adds that the emergence of "heroes' groves" acknowledges the symbolic power of the preindustrial space: "There nature always renewed herself and the fallen stood for the spring which was bound to come after the winter" (88). The

Wetlands portion of the Flight 93 memorial website promises a similar resurrection: "The Wetlands will serve as a 'natural' threshold of experience as the visitor approaches the Sacred Ground. As a habitat full of life, the area will be a healing landscape embraced by the curving maple path"

(http://www.honorflight93.org/memorial/design/wetlands.cfm). Likewise, the immutability of the designated Sacred Ground section of the park also anticipates regrowth and renewal:

As the final resting place for the passengers and crew of Flight 93, the

Sacred Ground is the focus of the Bowl. Here is where a grove of Hemlock

trees absorbed the impact and inferno of the crash. The public can closely

215 view the crash site from a plaza along its edge. The fields of the crash site

will be planted with wildflowers that bloom from May Plaza and wild flower

meadow [sic] at the Sacred Ground through September.

(http://www.honorflight93.org/memorial/design/sacred-ground.cfm).

Thus, the same forest that received the wreckage of Flight 93 and absorbed the violence of the crash mends itself over time, and the recovery of the woods is paralleled with the healing of the nation. The memorial landscape as "a scarred but beautiful place" emphasizes the role of nature as a transformation spectacle that situates the land and its meanings within the myths of wartime heroism; the narrative of the space, too, is transformative and appropriately (and strategically) nudges the visitor from grief to exaltation. As memorial architect Paul Murdoch explains in an open letter on the meaning of the design,

The land that has received [the dead of Flight 93] offers solace through its

beauty. We have tried to heighten this beauty and enhance the

monumental forms of the land to recognize and honor the heroic and

generous acts of courage of the passengers and crew....Here, in their final

resting place, the power of their everlasting presence will offer us courage

and inspiration forever.

(http://www.honorflight93.org/memorial/architect/letter-from-architect.cfm)

The restoration of the natural landscape after the crash and the tenacity of life within what is actually a mass grave becomes a monument to the "everlasting presence" of the dead; it can subsequently be read as an afterlife of sorts, or an immortality. Viewers are mollified by the assurance that the dead are now in a

216 "better place." The memorial is, after all, "a common field" that has become a

"field of honor forever" and is thereby transubstantiated into the dead; through the continuity of the natural environment, the story of the Flight 93 dead finds an afterlife for the Fallen, and "on visiting the battlefields, 'we dialogue with the dead' but in the end rejoicing overcomes lamentation" (Mosse 113).

The aesthetic rule-making so integral to memorialization extends also to cinematic representations of the Flight 93 story, for as Paul Virilio observes in

War and Cinema, theatrical releases and the "wave of cinema palaces" built to house them in the United States constitute "deconsecrated sanctuaries" and monuments in their own right (31); these are to be understood as a "historical necessity," he argues, as well as monuments in their own right that were the

Americans' answer to the Europeans' postwar cenotaphs and indestructible mausoleums. Initially after September 11 there was, of course, the immediate allergic reaction against making any reference to the terror attacks, which sprang from the expected demand for respectful silence in the wake of the events; filmmakers dutifully airbrushed out images such as that of the Twin Towers from blockbuster movies and their trailers, and many proclaimed that it would forever be too soon to produce a 9/11 movie. Nevertheless, within a few short years, the very same studios that had decried making the September 11 film as

"ambulance-chasing" were in business producing blockbuster movies that addressed the attacks head-on. Of these attempts to speak the disasters of

9/11, the most involved have been the films that depict the Flight 93 attack; again, it hardly appears an accident that that the work of revisiting this subject in

217 popular film, with the story's potential for a neat fit into the Great American Fight narrative, "attempts to convert a 'decentring' tale of terror into a 'recentring' story of heroism and community spirit" (Craps 195). With the popular film positioned as the "only artistic medium that now seems capable of informing the national mind about the shape and meaning of events" (Lewis), the story of Flight 93 would be told and retold as a memorial story that has removed the condition of witnessing an event from the experience of remembering it.

Of the efforts to bring Flight 93 to small and large screens, the mainstream feature film United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass (who directed the film between his work on the last two installments of the Jason Bourne franchise, The

Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) has predictably garnered the most public and critical attention and is, consequently, the most natural candidate for examining the role of film—more specifically, of the Hollywood blockbuster variety—in determining public perception and memory of the event. It is also noteworthy, that the very existence of such a film and its creation and distribution, most clearly represent the contradiction that defines sanctioned memorial behaviours in the entertainment arena, an area recognized for its amusements and lighter fare. While attempts at "edutainment" continue the familiar hybridization of pedagogy and pleasant distraction, the work of teaching and learning the September 11 disaster through Hollywood film brings a new problem into this model. While witnesses produced frequent comparisons between the un-reality of film and the events in real-time (as in the ubiquitous exclamations that the attacks were "just like a movie"), the business of getting

218 people into theatres to watch the disaster as a memorial film would generate specific difficulties for those involved in making the film as well as those viewing and reviewing the text.

Even something extraneous to the content of the film itself, the timing of its release, becomes problematic in analyzing the work as memorial. "Serious" moviegoers look forward to the unofficial start of the summer blockbuster lineup, in particular, films released around Memorial Day weekend, which are expected to be the most anticipated and profitable movies of the year. These summer movies as a whole are generally big-budget productions that are watched purely for entertainment; the rule of ascending interest applies here to artistic value, with more highbrow, meaningful, or "arthouse" designated work withheld until the fall season and positioned strategically for Academy Award consideration. The release of cinematic spectacles around Memorial Day weekend is a long­ standing tradition (beginning with the first "blockbuster" movie Jaws—which literally "busted" city blocks with lineups), one that, despite its seemingly paradoxical timing, usually does not present moviegoers with an ethical dilemma, no more than other start-of-summer pastimes, such as barbeques and family reunions. Ironically, while Memorial Day weekend movies that same summer, such as X-Men: The Last Stand and The Da Vinci Code, would manage to escape any philosophical opposition from moviegoers, the release of United 93 early in the summer 2006 cycle induced a moral panic in its prospective audience:

219 Everything about the film seemed to cause unease. Even the film's

posters and trailers sparked protests from moviegoers and concern from

theater owners. In New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, theater

patrons shouted "Too soon!" after seeing the trailer, and made tearful

complaints to theater management about being confronted with images of

9/11 that were "literally stunning".... A USA Today/Gallup poll published

on the day the film opened...[reported] 60 percent of the respondents

saying they did not want to see the film. (Jordan 201)

The positioning of the film to coincide with the start of the summer movie season, instead of capitalizing from the proximity of the film to a thematically appropriate observance, Memorial Day, ultimately contributed to a competition in meanings that (judging from its weak box-office numbers) most moviegoers would be unable to overlook. The attempt to situate the film itself as an option for anticipating and observing traditional Memorial Day themes was made very plain by its temporal positioning and by its well-timed campaign to donate ten percent of the film's opening weekend earnings to the United 93 Memorial fund; as a memorial text, it promised an opportunity to observe Memorial Day "properly" without having to visit a physical place: the memorial would be brought to the viewer conveniently at his or her nearest movie theatre. However, even while all the ideas around the film's integration into Memorial Day 2006 appeared to move in the same direction, the problem of overtly selling United 93 as a memorial text at a time slot usually designated for the grandest "fluff' features only intensified any ambiguity that the public felt towards viewing a movie about 9/11 "too soon."

220 So, while a September 11, 2006 release would have been in many ways a more logical choice for releasing the film, its thrust into the summer lineup would influence the fortunes of the film in ways that speak more transparently about the relationship of this Hollywood product and its role in directing public memory through its version of the heroic narrative.

The director of United 93, Paul Greengrass, would be brought in to tackle another internal contradiction of the film's work: its "unimaginable realities" (Burr qtd. in Jordan 207). Greengrass's auteur fingerprint is his cinema-verite look, which he achieves through the use of hand-held cameras; his directorial work, calculated to lend verisimilitude through a "documentary" style, assists rhetorically in elevating what is speculative material into a respectable "celluloid memorial":

The scenario is based on records from passengers' and crew members'

phone calls to family and others, all included in the 9/11 Commission

Report... The director went so far as to employ people actually involved

in the events, including air controllers and military personnel, to play their

own parts [most notably Ben Sliney, the national operations manager for

the Federal Aviation Administration]. Elsewhere in the film he chose to

cast actors with unfamiliar faces, giving the work the look of a historical

documentary and lending it added authenticity. (Boggs and Pollard 347)

However, given the scarcity of empirical evidence to pore over, Greengrass also had appreciable latitude in the interpretation of the known facts, and his selection and organization of details, far from creating anything "unimaginable" or

221 subversive, would script what was in actuality just another updated version of the

Frontier Myth. Nevertheless, its ability to sell its version of events effectively would be contingent upon a distancing of the film from its necessarily dramatized elements and a intensified focus on Greengrass's self-described commitment to

"obligations to the facts, to the broader community, and especially to those families" (Greengrass qtd. in Jordan 214, my emphasis). Here an infirm commitment to fact is forgivable if there can instead be "rigorously conscientious speculation" (Smith qtd. in Jordan 214):

Although no-one could state definitively that United 93 was a completely

accurate portrayal of the events of that day, the review offered family

members' sentimental authority as proof of the film's historical

authenticity.... [Rhetorically], this strategy was practically unimpeachable.

Challenging the film became tantamount to challenging the families'

memories of their slain relatives and their desire to see them publicly

honored... The success of this strategy hinged on the larger claim that

audiences would get a more meaningful image of 9/11, even if that image

was not entirely supportable by the known facts. (Jordan 215)

Greengrass's occasionally competing obligations to the truth of the event and its

"truthiness"21 are complimentary when considering the way in which the show of authenticity wins an entertainment the right to use dramatization and the resultant simulacrum towards creating an "official" memory. So, if distortions and

21 A term used by Stephen Colbert in the pilot episode of The Colbert Report to mean "truth that comes from the gut, not books," truthiness went on to become the American Dialect Society's word of the year in 2005 and Merriam-Webster's word of the year in 2006. I would argue that the word most aptly captures the Zeitgeist of the post-9/11 memorial movement and the insulated "democracy of death" that it consequently engenders. 222 outright inaccuracies are made apparent, as when FAA operations manager Ben

Sliney confirmed that his role in the events and its "emotional history" had been altered, these details are defended as being crucial to the true "spirit" and purpose of the work as a commemorative project, with the attendant, albeit unspoken suggestion that a stronger adherence to certain facts could actually be detrimental to the success of the text as a memorial:

In one scene, Sliney, desperate for information on the unfolding crisis,

loses his temper and swears at his staff...[Sliney] revealed that he "didn't

shout at anybody that day and get aggravated." The direction to change

his behavior on camera came from Greengrass. "Paul wanted me to

swear," Sliney explained. "The first two takes I didn't, and then he pleaded

with me to swear"....When confronted with a choice between drama and

reality, [King, Sliney's interviewer] implied, Greengrass showed that he

would choose drama. (Jordan 218)

Greengrass's decision as an artist of a commemorative piece to exploit this dramatic license in order to appeal to a moral understanding on the part of the viewer about the film's relationship with the Dead and their surviving families, informed by "sentimental authority," functionally barred any criticism of the film's treatment of the historical content from the discussion as part of an in-group censoring of the record; such a change outlines "one of the problematic

'rules'...that any survivor, no matter how inarticulate, is superior to the greatest...historian who did not share in the experience" (Linenthal 216). In a similar fashion, a certain flexibility with factual detail is permissible and indeed

223 expected in the production of the film for it to commemorate tragedy in a way that is recognizable to audiences and, perhaps paradoxically, enlist the viewers' participation in assembling and memorializing a parade of "unimaginable realities."

As Daniel Mendelsohn points out in his examination of United 93. which compares the film against Greek tragedy (specifically Aeschylus's Persians), it is the very pageantry of a cathartic text and the audience's foreknowledge of its purpose and atmosphere that allows the film to succeed at telling its story without becoming dependent on fact-checking. Its performative objective of satisfying the emotional needs of the audience, and especially (as noted by Greengrass himself) those of the families of the fallen, makes it acceptable that United 93 is its own spoiler, effectively; people go to the movie not to find out what happened on the plane, perse, but to have their own high-minded assumptions about the victims and perpetrators confirmed. Consequently, the needs that the audience brings to a viewing of the movie are grounded in emotion and not information.

Alternatively,

[if] United 93 were a fictional TV movie of the week, you might watch it

with friends, and then go out for pizza without thinking about it ever again,

except perhaps to wonder why there was no real ending, or why you never

knew anything about the characters (and hence wondered why they act

the way they do). (Mendelsohn 44-45)

Just as Greengrass puts a speculative dramatizing to work in creating the "right" creative vision in United 93, the audience, too, subscribes to a familiar pact in its

224 engagement with the film as memorial, akin to Young's description of the

"administering of memory" that is enacted at memorial sites. In fact, it is doubtful that people scrutinize the fact that the movie deviates from fact to deliver on its tacit promises as drama to make people "feel" the story; viewers expect, for instance, that the editing of individual scenes and addition of background music are part of the Hollywood treatment of the subject, and that the movie, despite its real-time movement, is structured such that several simultaneous plotlines can occupy the same film while allowing it to fit an "acceptable" feature length of approximately two hours. All of these measures—and more—are "forgivable" as they serve the film's higher moral purposes, which are organized around eliciting a specific emotional response, one that "channeled the audience's emotions in a productive and honorable fashion" (Jordan 216, my emphasis).

In the case of United 93, the payoff is its cathartic rendition of the climactic events of the flight, which features vengeance as an implied, necessary continuation of the battle reenacted on screen. The closing minutes of the film depict the struggle between a group of passengers and the terrorists for control with the plane; initiated by the infamous call to battle uttered by Todd Beamer,

"Let's Roll," the sequence of events that follows celebrates a righteous violence, in the style of the Frontier Myth, as a "preferred instrument—to achieve national interests....As might be expected of any campaign against evildoers, violence easily takes on cathartic and redemptive features—in warfare as in movies"

(Boggs and Pollard 349). Shuffled scenes pan from female passengers in tearful distress to the struggle that brought the righteous fighters on the plane to front of

225 the cabin and eventually into the cockpit; scenes of the panicked terrorists also appear inter-spliced into this montage, with the confused simultaneity culminating in the crowd closing in on a captured terrorist who is then, it is suggested to the viewer, killed by the encircling mob, although the film hastily glosses over the details of this presumed summary execution—after all, as Susan Sontag explains, "to display the dead is what the enemy does" (64). The on-flight counterinsurgency that one witnesses in United 93. with its graphic face-clawing and strangulation, is separated from the horror or action film hands-on gorefests familiar to contemporary moviegoers only by its "moral character." The "'last stand' epic" (Slotkin's term) persuasion of the battle scene makes the expected attrition not just a bearable loss but a heroic sacrifice, and the murder of the terrorist is shown to be "acceptable...as it appeared to be necessarily and rationally related to the use of effective tactics in pursuit of worthy goals" (Slotkin

533). In this vein, this celluloid fight story of Flight 93 retells a very old story indeed; as the spiritual successor of other famous American "last stands"—

Groton Heights, the Alamo, Little Bighorn—Flight 93's epic battle joins a long­ standing tradition of frontier violence after which a distinctly "American style of effective and principled action" (Slotkin 577) is thought to be modeled. So, once again, we are instructed to remember Flight 93 in much the same way that we

"Remember the Alamo"—that is, with sights set on the future stages of a promised redemptive war. To hesitate at any point in this enterprise would be decidedly un-American, and United 93 takes the time, too, to show the audience what exercising this option would look like when a German passenger, Christian

226 Adams, becomes the sole pacifist on the plane and, consequently, "the story's fall guy, the token cowardly German amid a band of brave Americans" (Brooks n.p.).

Finally, in a narratively curious twist, the fight story, when it was ready to move beyond its renditions in the memorial proposal, the website, and the movies, came packaged with its own frontier-grade battle cry: Let's roll. Todd

Beamer's now immortal words, which were captured in his last onboard telephone message and allegedly marked the start of the battle on the plane, rose to become the slogan of the War on Terror, Flight 93's very own "Remember the Alamo." The utility of the phrase and its rich associative meanings contributed to its widespread currency in the cultural ether of post-September 11

America: a November 8, 2001 presidential address entitled "Let's Roll" by Bush directly appeals to the values promoted by these two deceptively simple words:

Courage and optimism led the passengers on Flight 93 to rush their

murderers to save lives on the ground. Led by a young man whose last

known words were the Lord's Prayer and "Let's roll." [sic]

He didn't know he had signed on for heroism when he boarded the

plane that day. Some of our greatest moments have been acts of courage

for which no one could have ever prepared. We will always remember the

words of that brave man, expressing the spirit of a great country. We will

never forget all we have lost, and all we are fighting for. Ours is the cause

of freedom. We've defeated freedom's enemies before, and we will defeat

them again. We cannot know every turn this battle will take. Yet we know

227 our cause is just and our ultimate victory is assured. We will, no doubt,

face new challenges. But we have our marching orders: My fellow

Americans, let's roll. (701)

At around the same time that Neil Young was recording his memorial song

"Let's Roll" for his album Are You Passionate? ("Let's roll for freedom/Let's roll for love/We're going after Satan/On the wings of a dove"), Lisa Beamer,

Todd's widow, applied to trademark her late husband's expression; despite being the third of fourteen applicants, she was successful, and Let's Roll became the property of the Todd M. Beamer Foundation (a charity to help child victims of trauma, mostly through mentoring). By early 2004, Lisa

Beamer had published a memoir that she co-wrote with Ken Abraham entitled Let's Roll: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage, and her foundation, which had been renamed Heroic Choices, had approximately $4 million in assets (Moore n.p.), most of which was not collected by using the phrase Let's Roll "to sell hats, T-shirts and mugs in [Todd's] memory" in order to fundraise as originally planned but by selling the rights to the expression to "megadonors," including Wal-Mart (which used the phrase as an "employee motivational slogan") and the Florida State University football team (Gillespie n.p.). Despite Lisa Beamer and her foundation approaching the trademarking of Let's Roll as "a strictly preventive measure from [the foundation's] standpoint...to limit its use...to be able to protect it...to utilize that to benefit the children" (Okwu n.p.), Beamer's words, in their more

228 recent hyperconformist proliferation, subsequently metamorphosed into its post-post-9/11 manifestation in "an increasingly curious afterlife" (Gillespie).

The circuit of the Flight 93 heroic story thus ends where it begins with the utterance of its war cry, but it arrives at this conclusion changed, so the same words that began Larry David's humorous routine at the beginning of this chapter return here in a different variety of joke, one that follows the traces of this expression from rebel yell to a (literally) commercial tagline and, upon continued scrutiny, the denouement that faithfully joins the mobilization of Flight 93's heroic myth to its retreat and, ultimately, to the stage at which the story inevitably completes its mythographic magic, leaving nothing behind besides "these new objects from which all soiling trace of origin or choice has been removed" (Barthes 151). Arguably, Flight 93 is on the threshold of the latter phase of its development; with the lack of weapons of mass destruction and still-uncertain exit maneuvers exhausting the war on terror now existing as open secrets, the cost of September 11 memorialization at the national level outpacing fundraising exponentially

(Heroic Choices itself went from being perhaps the most successful fundraising organization in 2004 to a mere shadow of its former self in 2007; with its standing assets of approximately $100000 expected to dwindle, the organization was reported by the Non-Profit Times as "looking for a rescue of its own" in the form of a merger with a larger operation), and the more immediate problems that have arrived with recent economic hardships in the world community at large, the story of Flight 93 has been treadmilled past its

229 original applications. In this context, what made David's Curb Your

Enthusiasm episode so inappropriately funny even five years ago loses some of the shock value in its teasing subversion as its strategy now becomes clearer to the attentive audience; aptly titled "The Survivor," the episode, for all its absurdist and contrived comedy hijinks (between a

Holocaust survivor and Colby Donaldson, runner-up of Survivor: The

Australian Outback, for example, with each man arguing he was the "better survivor," promptly followed by the Rabbi's outrage at Larry over his inconsiderate use of the phrase "Let's roll") mercilessly satirizes an exaggerated identification with victimhood that has characterized both post-

9/1 1 memorial discourse and the general affect of nation-building in the wake of this and similar events. Once we are shown that this joke has been on us the whole time, one whose outward rippling (and possibly horrifying) consequences remain to be discovered, laughter at such "entropic comedy"

(O'Neill's term) becomes our last act of defense.

230 Chapter Six

Beauty is Truth: Jessica Lynch and the Reimagining of the Hero

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue,

nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from

doing the same things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do

not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or you feel that

some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then

you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no

rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a rule of thumb, therefore,

you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising

allegiance to obscenity and evil....

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care

for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth,

watch how you vote....

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate

what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen

becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of

vision are skewed.... The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot.

And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that

surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but in fact

represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

231 Thus begins Tim O'Brien's process analysis of narrating "story truths" in his short fictional text, "How to Tell a True War Story," a piece from his larger, well-known work The Things They Carried that describes his more general project of using the craft of storytelling to broker a meeting point between what is empirically true and what is emotionally true. In O'Brien's reflections on how he thinks this task is best fulfilled in a war story (espoused in a practical sense by virtually everything that O'Brien has written—he returns over and over again in his work to his own memories of serving as a drafted infantryman in Vietnam), the responsibility of the storyteller in recreating what really happened, at a certain time at a certain place, is to practice a fidelity to the notion of experiential truth that somewhat self- contradictorily calls for the selective refusal of what is factual in order to promote a higher understanding of certain truths. Michel Foucault similarly alludes to the provocative role of fictions in the discovery of truth in noting

the possibility [that] exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional

discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true

discourse engenders or "manufactures" something that does not as yet

exist, that is, "fictions" it. One "fictions" history on the basis of a political

reality that makes it true, one "fictions" a politics not yet in existence on the

basis of a historical truth. (Power/Knowledgel 93)

Examples of these fictioning truths are readily had when dealing with war and the stories that it births, with both ends of this mythic production tract emerging as places "where only ideal imagery is allowed to enter" (Fussell, Wartime 128). A war story that aptly conforms to the paradoxical model of fictioning history is

232 Jessica Lynch's memorial narrative, which, notwithstanding its interpretive departure from O'Brien's definition of story truths (which, as he suggests, do not subscribe to didactic readings), most fully realizes the potential of storytelling to replicate nationalist myths and, consequently, certain pro-social "truths" in wartime.

When I first began drafting an earlier incarnation of this chapter between the winter of 2004 and the spring of 2005, Private First Class Jessica Lynch—or, to be more precise, the myth of Private Jessica Lynch22—was still on a rapidly ascending celebrity trajectory. Lynch, whose capture and rescue behind enemy lines in 2003 would become the stuff of War on Terror iconography, by then had had her biography I Am a Soldier, Too published by Knopf (the authorized biography, which was penned by Rick Bragg) and a prime-time television movie,

Saving Jessica Lynch, released by NBC; she had also been involved in a flurry of other high-profile appearances, including an exclusive interview with Diane

Sawyer, the Glamour Women of the Year Awards (where she was seen posing beside fellow guest Britney Spears) and a special "guest star" installment of

Extreme Makeover Home Edition in which she assisted the family of her late best friend Lori Piestewa (a member of Lynch's convoy who perished in the attack) in

Aaron B. O'Connell, a historian and former U.S. Marine, discusses the significance of Lynch's "demotion" to Private (the rank of Private is one below that of Private First Class) in media representations at some length in his article "Saving Private Lynch: A Hyperreal Hero in an Age of Postmodern Warfare." Notably, he begins his deconstruction of her rescue narrative by addressing this disparity: In fact, there is no such thing as Private Lynch. It is a media event, a hyperreal fiction. We must be clear to distinguish between the two: Jessie Lynch is a person, a young woman, still suffering from broken bones, partial paralysis, and an experience of trauma. Private Lynch, on the other hand, is a discourse: a constellation of statements, images, and shared assumptions, imbued with meaning by its relation to a fictional text [Saving Private Rvanl. (37) 233 renovating their Arizona home. At the height of her fame, Lynch was, in fact, so desirable and ubiquitous as a national celebrity that she was then actively turning down lucrative deals (most notably from CBS for a documentary, then Viacom subsidiaries Simon & Schuster and MTV for a book deal and an MTV2 co-hosting slot, respectively [O'Connell 36]). In the four intervening years, however, between my last cycle of research on the then-overexposed national heroine and my current reintroduction to the work now in 2009, vestiges of the Lynch narrative remain, but its protagonist has herself retreated into an increasingly distant cultural memory, with isolated sightings of her resurfacing from her present civilian life as a student and young mother occurring only infrequently and very briefly.

The two last noteworthy mainstream media appearances by Lynch, both of which occurred in 2007, assist in explicating her eventual expulsion from public view. In January, after the birth of her daughter Dakota Ann, Lynch was featured with the infant in a smattering of human interest stories in popular magazines such as People. Lynch anticipated and entertained the more trivial questions that her temporary return to the limelight would elicit from the curious spectators by noting, for instance, in an article in Glamour that her daughter is "a miracle because [she] didn't know if [her] injuries would prevent [her] from having children" and hinting to the interviewer that she and the father of her child, Wes, would consider being married someday, though they were, in her words, "in no hurry... things are perfect the way they are now" (Pesta); however, in the same

June article, "I'm Jessica Lynch and Here's My Real Story," she also sought

234 again to bring the public's attention to her second, more controversial appearance that year—one that would effectively become the swan song of her public profile and finally divorced Lynch from her own heroic mythology: her testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government

Reform in April as it investigated the case of U.S. Army Ranger Corporal Pat

Tillman23 to determine the sources of the misinformation that had circulated regarding the circumstances of his death. The aim of the hearing, which

Chairman Henry Waxman announced in his opening statement, was to rectify the flagrant misrepresentation that had indicated that "[f]or Jessica Lynch and Pat

Tillman, the government violated its most basic responsibility. Sensational details and stories were invented in both cases. Sometimes, because of the fog of war, the first reports from the battlefield are inaccurate. But that doesn't seem to explain what happened here" (Committee on Oversight and Government

Reform). After Lynch received a subpoena from the committee to testify

The case that launched a thousand conspiracy blogs, the official story of Pat Tillman has proven to be difficult to contain officially for many of the same reasons as Lynch's; consequently, as the pairing of testimonies from Lynch and the Tillman family would suggest, it is productive to read these examples side by side: Cpl. Tillman, who played NFL football as a defensive back (linebacker and then safety) for the Arizona Cardinals, turned down a three-year $3.6 million dollar contract extension to enlist in the U.S. Army in May 2002. After Tillman was killed during his second tour of duty in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, the circumstances around his death became increasingly mysterious, at least in part because of its too-perfect tragic cycle: according to early Pentagon reports confirming his death, Tillman, the patriotic NFL star and "poster boy of the War on Terror" (Lawrence n.p.) had sacrificed himself willingly while fighting off "intensifying enemy fire" from the Taliban long enough for his fellow officers to escape (he and an Afghan militiaman were the only two killed). However, after later reports from witnesses at the scene of Tillman's death confirmed that there was actually no enemy fire and that he was killed after apparent confusion broke out between two U.S. Army units, a continuous (and, Tillman's family argues, calculated] mishandling of evidence following Tillman's death has made it impossible for his surviving family to verify accurately what really occurred. After more recent autopsy findings reported that Tillman was actually shot "three times in the forehead at very close range" (Lawrence), the family now sees ample reason to pursue its inquiry as a murder case and not simply one of accidental fratricide. Complicating the case further are reports that just prior to being dispatched, Tillman had rather loudly expressed antiwar sentiments by describing the war as "fucking illegal" and encouraging his comrades in arms to protest the Bush administration policies by voting for Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

235 alongside members of Tillman's family, she appeared before it on April 24 to cite and correct the inaccuracies in the stories circulated about her ordeal, specifically the hyperinflated treatment of her heroism:

When I remember those difficult days, I remember the fear. I

remember the strength. I remember that hand of that fellow American

soldier reassuring me that I was going to be okay. At the same time,

tales of great heroism were being told. At my parents' home in Wirt

County, West Virginia, it was under siege by media all repeating the

story of the little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went

down fighting.

It was not true.

I have repeatedly said, when asked, that if the stories about me

helped inspire our troops and rally a nation, then perhaps there was

some good. However, I'm still confused as to why they chose to lie

and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow

soldiers that day were legendary: people like Lori Piestewa and First

Sergeant Dowdy who picked up fellow soldiers in harm's way; or

people like Patrick Miller or Sergeant Donald Walters who actually did

fight until the very end.

The bottom line is the American people are capable of

determining their hero-ideals for heroes and they don't need to be told

elaborate lies. My hero is my brother Greg who continues to serve his

country today. My hero is my friend Lori Piestewa, who died in Iraq but

236 set an example for a generation of Hopi and Native American women

and little girls everywhere about the contributions that just one soldier

can make. My hero is every American who says, "My country needs

me"—and answers that call for—to fight.

I had the good fortune and opportunity to come home and to

tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, they [sic] do not have

that opportunity.

After then presenting her laundry-list of corrections to the official story of her experiences as a rescued prisoner of war, Lynch concluded her statement before the commission with a flourish: her summation, "The truth is always more heroic than the hype," serves as a poetic final line that is at once jaded by its knowing, exhaustive repetition (for Lynch began challenging the dominant storyline as early as late 2003, when the few and scattered memories she shared started to shape her narrative in direct opposition to official versions) and a naive, optimistic insistence on the triumph of literal truth, with all its destabilizing baggage, over a saccharine but fundamentally untrue simulation purported by "the tales of great heroism" that included her own. Predictably, though, by attempting to claim an inconvenient individual ownership over her "real story," Lynch positions herself as an antagonist to her own myth, the ecology of wartime expression in toto and, subsequently, to the community that these authenticate and fortify; now, as a subversive

"who refuses to forget or remember what [the dominant memory] prescribes...[her] private memories are driven underground, to exist as a

237 potentially threatening undercurrent to the social order" (Vance 9).

Accordingly, after the delivery of her child had afforded her a brief re-entry into the public view as an amusement, the delivery of her scathing testimony against her own memorial story three months later, conversely, would soon after ensure that Lynch would be dropped back into obscurity and kept there; the inevitability of this outcome invites at this time a more detailed examination of her memorial story and the circumstances of its motivation, production, and dissemination, as well as what each of these processes ultimately contributed to her applied myth and its conquests. In short, this chapter aims to fashion a counterargument to Lynch's aforementioned assumption about how heroes should be made and remembered; though it may be that "people can determine their own hero-ideals" by their own processes, as Lynch argues, that either the "real heroics" of individuals or personally selected heroes matter in the organized course of mainstream

September 11 commemoration proves to be a warming but patently unsupportable conclusion, as the pragmatics24 around Lynch's own case study make abundantly clear.

Her memorial story did not have to wait for her to die, as it happened; instead, Lynch—the person, the soldier—was effectively killed off by her myth and her story of heroism. Her official story, as an aggregate of various circulating reports that tracked her progress from capture to recovery goes something like this: a poor, 19-year-old small town girl (Lynch hails from

24 That is, the contextualized language of her case, though the term could certainly work to include the practical factors that situate her and her narrative, as this chapter also makes clear. 238 Palestine, West Virginia), Private Jessica Lynch worked as a supply clerk in the 507th Maintenance Company, a U.S. Army support unit that was, as she liked to joke, responsible for issuing toilet paper to the troops in Iraq. The convoy was ambushed by Iraqi forces in Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003, and while (as early reports by the Washington Post described) Lynch attempted to fight off the attackers, she was ultimately subdued and captured by the enemy. She was then subjected to various abuses, both by her captors and those who worked at the hospital where she was a patient; it is alleged by her biographer (Rick Bragg) that Lynch was the victim of rape, a claim that appeared to be all but confirmed by Lynch's youthful innocence and fine looks. With the help of an Iraqi informant, Mohammed Odeh al-Rahaief, U.S.

Special Forces launched an early morning raid on the hospital holding Lynch, successfully rescued her, and transported her to safety. The iconic images of the spectacular rescue (and most reading this will still remember the ubiquitous night vision scenes of the rescue released by the Pentagon) remain even while Lynch herself has disappeared; it is, in fact, these very representations of Lynch that caused her to become superfluous to her own story in much the same way that Audie Murphy25 had become vestigial to his

The son of poor Texas sharecroppers, Audie Murphy was a decorated WWII hero who eventually became a Hollywood movie star after his picture on the cover of Life magazine attracted the attention of actor James Cagney ["Audie Murphy," Wikipedial. His youth (Murphy managed to enlist at age 16 by lying about his age), slight build, boyish good looks, and rural charm made his exploits in the war seem all the more spectacular, and his high profile upon returning home a hero suggests that the film industry was able to capitalize on these strengths; Murphy went on to star in 44 Hollywood films, most of these Westerns. His most successful film, To Hell and Back (1955), was based on his autobiography by the same name and made him a household name; it remained the top-grossing Universal Pictures film until its record was broken by Jaws in 1975. Despite being a superstar, however, Murphy suffered from severe PTSD and struggled with addiction (primarily to Placidyl, a sleep aid); he was also a compulsive gambler 239 story decades earlier: both had been overshadowed by the perfection of their myths, to the point where they were either inconsequential to their image or, as in the case of Lynch, directly inconvenient to it. Lynch's heroic myth, which came out of "a script made for Hollywood. Made by the

Pentagon" (Kampfner), readily asserted itself over the divergent accounts of her ordeal, so that when conflicting information surfaced—the extensive progression of corrections that revealed that her convoy had taken a series of wrong turns, that her gun had seized up before she could squeeze off a single shot, that the guards had fled long before the rescue, that she had not been raped, that she received better than adequate care at the hospital

(Kampfner)—all of these details were either successfully worked into the myth itself or otherwise neutralized. To complicate the situation further for

Lynch, the post-traumatic amnesia that she suffered after her ordeal largely eliminated her from the storytelling altogether, at least initially; by the time she had regained some personal control over the recall of events, her input was already too far outside the myth to matter.

Understanding the current of civic memory that first carried Lynch meteorically up to heroic superstardom and then, in a continuous parabolic movement, buried her in common obscurity first demands a more thorough explanation of selective remembrance at the individual level, the paradoxical interplay between memory and amnesia summarized compactly by one

(Audie Murphy Research Foundation). Murphy's celebrity very likely worsened the problems that he had to struggle with in his personal life, such that it becomes reasonable to argue that it was actively destructive towards his mental health and his person; in this sense, Lynch's story is the spiritual successor of Murphy's: both as people "died" through their mediated heroism. 240 Homer Jay Simpson : "Well, everything looks bad when you remember it."

Yes, everything looks bad when you remember it. Certainly this is the case with unpleasant or regrettable memories, which is why, as Homer suggests, we so often resort to the defensive strategies of repression, transference, and motivated forgetting. But, there the complementary renaming of these procedures would be, in combining these self-protective actions, the function of motivated remembering; it must follow logically, then, that when a bad memory needs to look anything but bad (or otherwise counfe/productively ambiguous), some major reconstructive surgery is in order. Perhaps at no other time is the advanced contrivance of memory, both at the individual and collective levels, more pronounced and necessary than at wartime, when such conscious alteration becomes the essential fulcrum maintaining the forced, uneasy equivalence between the damage, collateral or otherwise, of a "good war" and the high-minded ideals that justify its continuance, while all the time

Homer Simpson is contradiction personified, I think, for, despite being a cartoon character whose primary trait is utter, unevolved stupidity, he is possibly among the most referenced of figures. Several exhaustive, fan-constructed lists continue to appear online offering quotes for "everyday use" and one's less-than-everyday usage, such as, in the case of this chapter, pontificating again upon the measured convergences between the censorship of personal memories in the interest of establishing a collective memory. As always, though, Homer can be conveniently counted upon here for some tidbit of accidental, non-specific wisdom to probe this topic further: the Simpsons episode "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer [The Mysterious Voyage of Homer]" opens with the familiar scenario of Homer's wife Marge unsuccessfully attempting to stop him from embarrassing the both of them in public. This time around, after failing to prevent Homer from discovering the annual Springfield chili cook-off (where he had humiliated her the previous year by getting "as drunk as a poet on payday"), a nonplussed Marge pleads with him to recall his behaviour at the last cook-off. With a shrug of his shoulders, Homer matter-of-factly replies, "Well, of course, everything looks bad when you remember it"; he puts on his "chili boots" and strides out the door, proving once again that the secret to his ability to live happily with himself and the consequences of his daft selfishness is his uncanny knack for not remembering anything. 241 [t]he much simpler and more fundamental fact [remains] that injuring is, in

fact, the central activity of war. Visible or invisible, omitted, included,

altered in its inclusion, described or redescribed, injury is war's product

and its cost, it is the goal toward which all activity is directed and the road

to the goal, it is there in the smallest enfolded corner of war's interior

recesses and still there where acts are extended out into the largest units

of encounter. (Scarry 81)

If mass persuasion is required to condone acts of aggression against other human beings, in aggregate the "alterations in body tissue" (81) that Elaine

Scarry refers to as the final destination of war called by its bluntest name, memory must be tweaked accordingly to justify these needful atrocities as some heroic path to "freedom or ideological autonomy or moral legitimacy" as a means of eradicating the pollution of cognitive dissonance that may emerge when the aspirations and actualities of a "good war" imminently oppose each other. Such complications cannot be allowed to exist unmodified; there can be no such dissonance between the traits of Ours and Theirs. Once the dividing lines are redrawn between the community and its "constitutive outside" (Mouffe 85), the proximate territories and their boundaries are sustained by what Paul Fussell identifies as the particular "morale culture of wartime" (164), an atmosphere in which such definitions systematically find both their expression and their genesis within the management of remembrance.

Mnemonic media can compress just the right mix of selective memory and selective forgetting to become the naturalization of national myth of morale

242 culture into national fact; that is, myth supplants fact by becoming its more attractive simulacrum:

Myth does not deny things...on the contrary, its function is to talk about

them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a

natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of

an explanation but that of a statement of fact. (Barthes 143)

The simulation of goodness and exceptionalism renders the American moral victories realer than real. In the War on Terror, the greatest danger is ambiguity; it is a war without containing sides, only the spectre of the terrorist Other whose inconsistency simultaneously frustrates the American war machine and stimulates its re-establishment. The propagandist function hinges on the structured imperialism of certain images and ideas, but the production of these defining notions depends entirely on the presence—real or simulated—of a constructed opposition:

[T]he State itself has always been in a relation with an outside and is

inconceivable independent of that relationship. The law of the State is not

the law of All or Nothing (State societies or counter-State societies) but

that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. (Deleuze and

Guattari 360)

Sovereignty can thus exist only in opposition to an outside challenge, but in this endeavour the exterior Other must also be identifiable and substantive. The memorial story assists in playing into the insistence of this pressure as it captures the essence of selfhood, investing memory only with details that are "meaningful"

243 in reviewing our self-understanding while omitting or downplaying any information that could disturb the marginalization of the Other. The persistence of selfhood relies entirely on this difference, on an opposition that allows Us to be.

Memorial stories contribute to making the good war live, if only as a simulation; the sustainability of a community that is whole and total in its righteousness relies heavily on the use of "social fantasy" (Zizek Sublime 126) and the symbolic order that myth, as the matter of social fantasy, effectively brings about. Such is the contract between myth and ideology, for

the stake of social-ideological fantasy is to construct a vision of society

which does exist, a society which is not split by antagonistic division, a

society in which the relation between its parts is organic, complementary.

The clearest case is, of course, the corporatist vision of Society as an

organic Whole, a social Body in which the different classes are like

extremities, members each contributing to the Whole according to its

function—we may say that "Society as a corporate Body" is the

fundamental ideological fantasy. How then do we take account of the

distance between this corporatist vision and the factual society split by

antagonistic struggles?

... If we look at it through the frame of (corporatist) fantasy [the answer]

appears as an intruder who introduces from outside disorder,

decomposition and corruption of the social edifice—it appears as an

outward positive cause whose elimination would enable us to restore

order, stability and identity. (Zizek Sublime 126-128)

244 There is the familiar insistence on the separation of inside and outside, but there is also familiarity in the interpretation of this fantasy as monomyth, which, when also understood as the story of the hero's journey, can be understood most literally when applied to wartime memoirs; the same story may be told through several outlets, but an identical formula is common to them all, which Joseph

Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the following generic formula:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of

supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a

decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious

adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (23)

Fussell identifies the application of this tendency in producing uniform renditions of the same heroic themes during wartime, of trying to "fix up 'an ideal situation from a picture point of view,...trying to recreate war as we were ail taught in history books'...the action must be rendered in the received cliches: otherwise it will look inauthentic to the audience" (Wartime 190). The War on Terror and

Hollywood overlap in their use of cliches and archetypical plot formulae because they both feed into and leak out of the collective American Self; they both

"accentuate the positive" in moments of psychic distress and mobilize in establishing and defending U.S. ideology against the Other. Consequently, the mass media "do their part," as D. W. Griffith noted during his early attempts to capture the First World War on film led him to proclaim that "[v]iewed as drama, the war is somewhat disappointing" (Walker 188), to construct a favourable

245 portrait of war, one that has "human meaning" but, more important, coincides with what our repertoire of collective myths means to teach us about ourselves. It should not be surprising, therefore, when the military and the media cross- pollinate to produce monolithic storylines with titles such as Saving Jessica

Lynch.

As it turns out, two of Lynch's starting personal queries that direct her challenges against the myth built around her and her supposed exploits, the first being Why can't people decide their own heroes? and its follow-up Why did they (the military, the media) have to lie?, are really two ways of pursuing the same line of interrogation about the general problem of the motivation behind wartime myths and their tributary narratives; an introduction to the interchangibility and implied equivalence between myth—about heroes, about villains—history, and memory says more general things about how this trifecta works in a wartime context. Insofar as a "historical" event serves as a fixed referent in a Baudrillardian sense to a collective memory or consciousness, its absence signals "these death pangs of the real and of the rational...open[ing] onto an age of simulation" (Baudrillard Simulacra and

Simulation 43); in plainer language (which Jean Baudrillard's work so often simultaneously resists and demands), because so many of us live apart from the events that "make history," we cannot witness them firsthand; we therefore cannot spontaneously construct our own memories and historical understanding of these for ourselves. The lack of immediacy between us and the event makes it possible, then, for Baudrillard to make his

246 superficially startling argument, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place—use it as the title of his most famous book, even—and have it become irrefutable at least at some theoretical level. It can be thus assumed that an event without witness may be no event at all, but, again, an important extension of this logic can be negotiated with the assistance of the memorial story: if there were witnesses, there was an event; if l/he/she was there, it must have happened. Said often and loudly enough, "lost myths live again" (Baudrillard

43) to give a history back to us, albeit in a changed state—"instant history"— that calls to mind the narrative production standards of cinematic entertainments: "purged, pure, [and] hyperrealist" (45).

The memorial story takes its place in this hyperreal corrected historicity of events, with the perfected version, or what Lawrence critiques as the monomyth of exceptionalism in The Myth of the American Superhero, as its centre of gravity and the basic legitimacy of history organized around the thorough, selective domestication of individual memories in accordance to monomythic conditions; consequently, useful (self-serving) memories are grafted onto a reading of history that practices a fidelity to the requisite national mythologies of exceptionalism (while unproductive or resistant ones are discarded in the same process). Relevant to this convergence of personal memory and history under the shared expression of myth, Deleuze and Guattari assert that "history may try to break its ties to memory...the dividing line, however, is not there" (296); history and memory are matched in their shared acts of reterritorialization, of retelling events in a way that

247 subscribes to their majoritarian conditions, so that while "there exists a molecular [individual, personal] memory, [it can only be] as a factor of integration into a majoritarian or molar system" (294). The incorporation of altered memory into congealed historical "fact" is not to be written off as a simple, localized case of deception, then, which explains why an individual such as Jayson Blair, who was discovered to be fabricating stories as the former star journalist working for the New York Times, was promptly labeled a fraud and punished for misleading the public with falsehoods, whereas the historically productive memorial story, likewise fashioned and circulated as a means of providing the easy explanations, can consistently escape being pressed for verification because of the primacy of generalized myth over individualized standards of accuracy. It becomes a war story whose emotional truths override the sanctioning of factuality.

The stakes for the wartime memorial are even higher when, as in the commemoration of the events of September 11 and its subsequent moral crusade against terror, the war has no immediate conclusion in sight. The memorial story has less to do in this case with any actual remembering than with dispensing the accordant reproductions of heroic folklore at the national level as a method of mobilizing and sustaining the war effort. The retrospective recants the appropriate details to find its place within the monolithic discourse that the nation collectively engages in, consciously or unconsciously, with itself. In examining this process under the conditions (cultural, psychological) posed by wartime, the memorial story can be understood as the node that intersects

248 personal storytelling with the macro project of national mythmaking (itself a similar process of storytelling, notwithstanding the difference in scale); in the conversions between these, the personal memoir enacts the process of humanizing specified aspects of the conflict in order to define the real costs paid while making enemy losses ever more faceless and abstract by comparison.

Ultimately, the rhetorical payoff to be gained by having individual memories crystallized into these national narratives is the lending of a recognizable humanity and individualism to events that, "being inhuman, have no human meaning" (Fussell 143). In the climate of post-9/11 discourse, the memorial story—in fact, the very invocation of the individual retrospective—can be productive for this reason in restarting the machinery of American exceptionalism and providing the necessary sanitizing touch of authenticity. What is integral to history, what Baudrillard has called the "last great myth," is not the accuracy of the memory but the allusion to the act of remembering, whereby the resultant memory is not about faithful representation but faithful simulation of what are collectively understood as emotional truths; returning to O'Brien's working definition of story truths, what counts in the telling of a war memorial story is not the accuracy of remembrance perse but its emotional appeal and its ability to inspire the discovery of experiences that, in this case, inspire and unify the audience in their arrival at the truths that the narrative creates. What matters in producing the "official" account—the prescribed remembering—is striking the right notes in what John Shelton Lawrence aptly labels "rituals of innocence."

According to Lawrence, "9-11 has added new kinds of rituals that define

249 America's special place in the moral universe...rituals [that] present a compassionate, humanitarian face...[and] deepen the emotional commitment to war" (2).

As the fictional Hollywood movie producer Stanley Motss recommends to the president's crack team of spin doctors in Wag the Dog27, when Act One is the war, Act Two must always be that of the hero, for as he suggests, "You can't have a war and not have a hero." A supplementary addendum to Motss' moviemaking advice that helps to specify the terms of this symbiosis between war and its heroes would be that the terms of one traverse those of the other; it is a mutualism between these that requires bifocally viewing the stylization of the hero through the war and "the pressures and anxieties of [war/postwar] transition, which [give] that stylization a particular kind of ideological significance" (Slotkin

379) and, in an organic reversal of such a deduction, seeing also the managed characterization of the conflict epitomized through the stories of its heroes.

Pedantically useful variations of the hero archetype, in a predictable fashion, evolve and emerge as necessary, as Lynch says of her own hero narrative, to inspire the troops and rally a nation. In the case of the current conflict, while much of the myth adheres to the familiar themes of American exceptionalism and of the good war that it directs, the character of the archetypal hero has been

27 Co-written by David Mamet and Hilary Henkin and released in 1997, Wag the Dog is a film whose satirical treatment of virtual warfare (the plot revolves around the cooperative efforts between a team of spin doctors working for a disgraced U.S. president running for re-election and an infamous Hollywood producer to create a "fake war" in order to boost presidential approval ratings) proves eerily accurate to the point of appearing at times to be prophetic. The movie's ironic humour finds its climactic moment in the manufacturing of the "hero" of the false war, a soldier caught behind enemy lines; when the soldier turns out to be a violent convict, however, only the serendipity of his death at the hands of an enraged interloper can allow him later to be buried ceremoniously as a war hero. 250 expanded to accommodate both the Killer Elite (Slotkin's term) as the cultic

"Captain America" figure and its more tender counterpart of soldierly martyrdom, with the resultant hybrid taking its most pleasing shape in Jessica Lynch.

Lynch's story was the single most recognizable memoir to emerge from what would be one of the most costly military miscalculations in the ongoing Second

Gulf War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it came to be known. Lynch's story essentially expanded to become the official moral explanation for the war in Iraq; at the same time, and not coincidentally, Lynch had very little to do with the telling of her own "official" memoirs. The tabula rasa of her post-traumatic global amnesia is precisely what has allowed her story to be told as "perfectly" as it has been by the media, which in its efforts to fill in the blanks, has elevated Lynch's memorial narrative to its properly mythic proportions.

Lynch was a natural choice for mediated hero worship for a number of reasons. She was the first successfully rescued prisoner of war since World War

II, and she was the first female POWto be saved; consequently, as someone who went to the war and came back to talk about it, Lynch's military experience allows her story to conform to the particulars of what Paul Fussell details in The

Great War and Modern Memory as "the ritual of military memory":

Everyone who remembers a war first-hand knows that its images remain

in the memory with special vividness. The very enormity of the

proceedings, their absurd remove from the usages of the normal world,

will guarantee that a structure of irony sufficient for ready narrative recall

will attach to them...One remembers with special vividness too because

251 military training is very largely training in alertness and a special kind of

noticing. And one remembers because at the front the well-known

mechanisms of the psychology of crisis work to assign major portent to

normally trivial things...When a [soldier] imagines that every moment is his

last, he observes and treasures up sensory details purely for their own

sake. (327)

Although Lynch remembers very little of her detention behind enemy lines, the sparse details she does offer as a former POW lend a special prestige to her memoirs, particularly amongst the civilian majority whose encounters with the duties and attendant dangers of soldiering are limited to the secondhand. There is also, as a quieter but more influential factor involved in the ready acceptance of her memories as authentic, the mandatory respect that the figure of the soldier is due; this conditioned recognition of the self-sacrificing aspect of soldiering and the reverence that the work demands from its supposed beneficiaries entails a censorship that can easily repackage any form of antiwar criticism as anti-soldier, an unacceptable proposal indeed. Taking a rhetorical cue from the fallout that followed the disseminated tales of protestors spitting on returning Vietnam soldiers, those attempting to question a soldier's authoritative memorial story are required to observe the required rites beforehand: in the case of the 2007 U.S.

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, notably, each person giving testimony, including the director of the committee, Henry Waxman;

Pat Tillman's brother, Kevin Tillman, who also served in the military; and Jessica

252 Lynch, all began their testimonies with some explicit acknowledgement of the

troops and their noble profession:

I'll start this morning by stating what I think is already obvious: every one

of my colleagues — Democratic and Republican — genuinely supports our

troops. We are all deeply grateful for the sacrifices so many men and

women have made voluntarily to defend our country and our freedoms.

But it's probably just as obvious that the actions of our government

are not meeting our aspirations. We saw that vividly and unforgettably in

the disgraceful conditions at Walter Reed.

We saw it again when government officials made an intolerable

breach by making public the secret and classified CIA identity of Valerie

Plame Wilson.

And we are seeing it again this morning. The bare minimum we

owe our soldiers and their families is the truth. (Waxman's opening

statement, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform)

The hearing's multiple invocations of the inherent heroism of the troops can be taken as a pre-emptively defensive gesture in this case, one that takes

advantage of the same symbolic values that carry the magnetized yellow ribbon

campaign28; aligning oneself with the troops serves as an inoculation against the accusation of being unpatriotic. In fact, it is as if proclaiming this alliance with the armed forces is the only form of civilian insurance against such an accusation.

Of course, actually being a soldier takes this authenticating measure to a higher

281 refer here to the display of the magnetized yellow ribbon by Americans and Canadians alike to advertise their support for the armed forces. 253 level, so that their stories are likewise imbued with the same magically transformative moral energy, and Lynch's story is no exception to this rule of mythic transference.29

More important to the true war story by far, however, was that Lynch was a pretty, petite blonde, and her Saxon "star appeal" granted her the sort of celebrity that her fellow soldiers, such as Shoshana Johnson (who was also injured [she had both ankles shot] and captured by the enemy but came home to a thirty-percent disability allowance and no book deal30) and Lori Piestawa (a

Native American, the first female soldier to die in the conflict, and Lynch's best friend in the unit) would never receive. Her looks would be brought up continually as a worthy point of discussion, as if her cheerleader-turned-soldier

In a related strategy, soldiers who have participated in abhorrent or antisocial behaviour are dismissed as "unsoldierly." The example of PFC Lynndie England, who was convicted for her involvement in the Abu Ghraib scandal and served 521 days in prison, indicates the flexibility of the soldier's identity: when England defended her actions as simply following orders, then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld claimed to be shocked by her "totally unacceptable and un-American" behaviour, stating at a Pentagon news conference that "[the administration is] taking and will continue to take whatever steps are necessary to hold accountable those that may have violated the code of military conduct and betrayed the trust placed in them by the American people" ("Prisoner Abuse Un-American"). 30 A 507th Maintenance five-year "reunion" story featuring Shoshana Johnson, Patrick Miller, and Jessica Lynch provides the following updated information regarding Johnson's later failed book deal, status as first African-American female POW, and problematic disability claims: Johnson set out to write a memoir about her experiences, but the publishers cancelled the book deal last year [2007] when she didn't give them the story they had in mind. "They wanted this really religious book. I'm a Catholic and my faith is important to me, but as a single mom with tattoos, I can't be writing a book telling people how to live their life [sic]"... After her rescue, Johnson says, she had planned to stay in the Army. "But it was a little too much, physically and mentally." She struggled, too, with being the first African- American woman captured as a POW. "It's not something you strive for"... She, too [like African-American male Vietnam POWs], had been told that America didn't care about her as an African-American POW. There was much made of the fact that Johnson, as a black soldier, received a lower disability rating than Lynch, particularly after reports surfaced that Johnson protested her disability rating. But, she says, there was a back story there: It was not Lynch's condition that caused Johnson to file a protest...[she] protested because the military had initially denied her disability coverage for PTSD. The Army's assessment noted with startling bureaucratic blandness that Johnson's "time in Iraq was trying" but noted that her mental condition did not rise to the level of PTSD. (Mulrine n.p.)

254 prettiness had her pre-selected for survival. Of course, part of the definition of the Self-side of the propaganda equation entails beautification; the "Allied war

[was] fought by white Anglo-Saxons...with neat, short hair, clear eyes, gleaming teeth, and well-defined jawlines...the wartime 'we'" (Fussell, Wartime 128), but the evocation of the feminine ideal in documenting Lynch's ordeal connotes a positively altered interpretation of heroic exceptionality. Lynch herself stated in an interview with People magazine that she often wondered if the Iraqis had spared her only because "[she] was tiny or blonde or female" (O'Connor n.p.). By her own admission, she was different (in the right ways) and perhaps just exceptional enough to be allowed to live. A young, good-looking girl who had suffered blamelessly and exhibited almost Christ-like acceptance of her suffering

(all of these attributes—beauty, innocence, and Christie suffering—would be of import to the myth, we will see, both individually and in aggregate), Lynch put not only a human face on the War on Terror but also an innocent face that would offer the war a decidedly humanitarian angle. That her face, the face of a blonde, bright-eyed innocent, would be selected for such a purpose says something also about the nature of American self-understanding and how beauty and feminine delicacy play into wartime wish-fulfillment; more specifically, her role as a metaphor for the United States' sense of preordained exceptionalism depends entirely on her embodiment of everything antithetical to the soldier- aggressor. As such, she was the right hero for the moment, and the tale of her rescue offered relief to a nation confused by its undecided role in a war that

255 would seem at most times to be very much unwinnable, and as Aaron O'Connell observes, the well-timed narrative had the anticipated bolstering effects:

In the second week of the war, a poll conducted by ABC and The

Washington Post registered a drop in optimism on the war with

expectation of serious U.S. casualties soaring to 82%—twenty points

higher than the previous highest figure. Though domestic support for the

president still held firm, the reasons for going to war no longer seemed so

clear.

Then, on April 1st, a Special Forces team accompanied by military

cameramen rescued Lynch in a high-tech recovery operation. A still shot

of soldiers loading Lynch safely into a helicopter replaced her high school

photos in the evening news, and the nation warmed with patriotic and

religious fervor. Poll numbers reversed immediately. Another version of

the same Washington Post poll, taken two days after the rescue registered

a thirteen point jump in those who [thought] the war was going "very

well"—numbers which, at the time, were "better than...even the best

ratings for either the war on terrorism or the war in Afghanistan."

Overnight, the young PFC [Private First Class] became the first—and still

the most memorable—hero of the war. Even the Blackhawk helicopter,

whose reputation had taken such a beating since Somalia, was returned

to the good graces of the American public for carrying Lynch home. Time

Magazine reported that "it was like Black Hawk Down except nothing went

wrong." (35)

256 The accounts of Lynch's entrapment and abuse by the enemy taps into a couple of narrative tropes that, individually, have richly fabulist traditions within the standard discourse that war uses to describe itself; the conjunctive use of these standby storylines to magnify Lynch's tribulations is worth discussing now in more exact detail. First, the recurring emphasis on Lynch's patient suffering as an innocent victim recalls, again, the association of the common soldier with

Christ, a symbolic pairing that exploits

the basic rhythm of death and resurrection, suffering and redemption,

which were used to advocate war and aggression. What has been called

the theology of war—essentially that whoever is faithful to his family and

fatherland...also serves Christ...[is] traditional and assumed. (Mosse 77)

Jonathan Vance elaborates more fully on the role of the "Jesus-in-Khaki image"

(39) in situating the war effort and its expenditures as components of a righteous journey that followed that of Jesus Christ

through suffering and sacrifice to redemption and salvation... Just as Jesus

had given his life so that humanity could survive, so too did the soldiers

offer their lives for humanity. In this theology, each death was an

atonement, each wound a demonstration of God's love, and each soldier a

fellow sufferer with Christ. (36)

Obviously, the accounts of Lynch's hardships as a POW, by offering a meaning for the seemingly randomized losses she was forced to experience, serve in rationalizing her ordeal in the manner Mosse and Vance both describe; however, the interpreted religious overtones—what Northrop Frye termed "'displaced'

257 Christianity" (qtd. in Fussell, Great War 115) also advance her story by positioning the narrative—and her—beyond reproach. This sanctification of

Lynch's patient, Christian suffering also overlaps with the way in which

"storytellers have recast wars in America as narratives of captivity and rescue," stories which, in representing the first distinctly North American genre, have been culturally important since the seventeenth century:

In a generic captivity narrative, "the captive (an ordinary, innocent

individual, often a woman) embodies a people threatened from outside.

The captive confronts danger and upholds her faith: in so doing, she

becomes a symbol, representing the nation's virtuous identity to itself."

(Melani McAlister qtd. in O'Connell 38)

In a similar analytical vein, Slotkin proposes that

[t]he captive symbolizes the values of Christianity and civilization that are

imperiled in the wilderness war. Her captivity is figuratively a descent into

Hell and a spiritual darkness which is akin to "madness." By resisting the

physical threats and spiritual temptations [of the enemy], the captive

vindicates both her own moral character and the power of the values she

symbolizes. (14-15)

By establishing that the telling of Lynch's ordeal is a simple variation of the prototypical captivity narrative, with its accompanying Christian symbolism, it becomes reasonable to view her scenario as a disturbance of the natural social order; as a consequence, any means of restoring the organization of a "proper" state, including violence, are condoned by the myth as acceptable and

258 corrective. The reinstatement of this traditional garrison-mentality also explains the rigid racial dynamics of Lynch's narrative: like the original captivity narratives set in seventeenth-century colonial America, the story maintains a separation between White characters, who are assigned the heroic roles of both savior and victim, and the non-White enemy, which is why, again, the other two female captives, Lori Piestewa and Shoshana Johnson (both visible minorities), are left out of the narrative altogether.

Lynch's nonaggressive nature, which has also been highlighted consistently in her memoirs, evolved more gradually with her story; as the focus of her ordeal moved away from earlier official reports (the first of these by The

Washington Post) that described Lynch as having gone down firing to her admission that she had been taken prisoner while unarmed, the nature of her heroism also changed accordingly and, as the timing of the developments would prove, auspiciously. Unlike the soldiers of earlier wars, specifically those before

Vietnam, and different, too, from her male comrades, whose kill counts have been mentioned prominently in reports, Lynch's story emphasizes her victimization and survival as an innocent in the conflict. "Military culture still celebrates the soldier who racks up a high body count," explains Jonathan Eig,

"but since the Vietnam War, much of the country has tended to venerate survivors more than aggressors, the injured more than those who inflict injuries"

(2). However, while the action in Iraq the second time around has been compared to Vietnam in its abstract purpose, there still exists a prestige in the body count—but notably not by women, and clearly not in the case of Jessica

259 Lynch.31 Male soldiers, including those in her clerical unit, have their kill counts

put on prominent display; Sgt. Donald Walters, who was in Lynch's unit and

whose gunfire was allegedly mistaken for Lynch's in the melee and the official

sources' comedy of errors that followed, is credited with killing nine Iraqis, while

Seth Bunke, whom Rick Bragg, author of Jessica Lynch's authorized biography,

describes as a "six-foot-six, blond recruiting poster of a U.S. Marine" (121) has

his lethalness directly described as a foil to Lynch's passivity:

He is the opposite of Jessi, except for the color of his hair. His arms are

thick with muscle and his legs look like pulpwood logs. He entered the

service to fight, to go to war, and he killed when he got there...It was

already personal, before he and the others learned about Jessi. The story

they would hear made Seth Bunke want to kill, and made him proud

to...the story of the young woman in the hands of the brutal Fedayeen

took hold in the minds of the young marines, and it mushroomed: She

was being tortured, in the most cruel ways, every day, every hour.

"I took it personally," said Bunke. "I took it right to heart. I have a

sister. She's nineteen. I thought of Jessi, and I thought of the people who

would do that. I wanted to kill them.

"I killed thirty-four of them." (122-124)

31 Again, I see a purposeful comparison in the case of Lynndie England, whose participation in the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib has been regarded as the supreme expression of moral deformity; though six other soldiers were charged and convicted, and Specialist Charles Graner (co-conspirator, ex-boyfriend, and father of her child) was sentenced to ten years for his involvement in the abuse, England remains largely the public face of the scandal. It makes sense to me that her nonconformity to gender expectations may have played a considerable role in her selection as the scapegoat in the affair, despite receiving fewer charges and a lesser sentence than two of her convicted male counterparts (Graner and Sgt. Ivan Frederick) and, by all appearances, doing no worse than they in terms of committing acts of torture.

260 The narrative assumes that the bloodlust that Bunke discusses is one that

Americans share and do not know yet what to do with. John A. Lynn describes the shift in interested spectatorship from violent heroics to sympathetic suffering:

"We want to fight wars but we don't want any of our people to die and we don't really want to hurt anybody else. So Pvt. Lynch, who suffers, is a hero even if she doesn't do much. She suffered for us" (Eig 3). Bragg, in his transparent symbolic juxtaposition of Lynch and Bunke, highlights the duo's differences in aggression and has the effect of accentuating the importance of Lynch's martyrdom in motivating both the troops and, by extension, the homefront audience. Jessica Lynch becomes both a martyr and an excuse for behaviour that would be deemed unpardonable in most other situations. Lynch, as a woman and predictably the damsel in distress in the War on Terror grand narrative, is not permitted to kill, but her rescuer is expected to kill, specifically to kill them and be proud to do so. Rationalizing actions that are unbecoming to Us appears in light of Lynch's victimization to be acceptable because only by exterminating the enemy can she be saved. It is acceptable, too, in light of such reasoning, to overlook the fact that "real-man" Marines like Bunke, in their rage- fuelled attack "shot everybody" and left "dead women and children, used as human shields" (Bragg 122). Their deaths at the hands of American soldiers do not count, for They are not calculated into the costs of the conflict as human beings; even the Iraqi innocents are labeled human shields, indicating that they are to be viewed as objects that simply got in the way of rescuing Lynch. The remaking of Them as inhuman or inanimate explains how lives are measured in

261 the economics of war; it does not seem so mixed-up to kill thirty-four of Them— those creatures and shields—to save one Jessi. Their lives and deaths do not factor into the memorial story; they are incompatible with our understanding of the Right, which is why the chapter describing the bloodshed in Nasiriyah, entitled "A Blond Captive," is about just that: Jessica and her equally blond male champion, Bunke. This is their story, after all, and by extension a collective story about the romance and heroics of valiant soldiers; the opponent's casualties receive a scant three or four sentences as part of Bunke's kill record, objects whose deaths, both warranted and necessary, can be safely disregarded because "they were willing to die for Saddam, whom they either loved or feared more than the Americans who had come to free them" (Bragg 122).

Also integral to the way that Lynch's story of innocence was to unfold, most notably in Bragg's account but also in other mainstream versions, was

Jessica's virginal femininity. What Bragg describes as being definitive of Lynch's experiences at five years of age also explains her appeal as a woman of twenty:

"Jessi won people over without even trying. Cute is a currency like anything else"

(24). It hardly appears accidental that stories of Lynch's ordeal consistently allude to her tiny girl-ness. Bunke, in Bragg's Lynch biography, equates Lynch with his sister, and it is ultimately this comparison that inspires him to kill thirty- four Iraqis. Greg Lynch, Jr., Jessica Lynch's actual brother, shares Bunke's vengefulness; at Jessica's homecoming, he "smiled at her and joked, but all he could think about was somehow, anyhow, striking back at the people who had done this to her. As her hugged her, he thought about choking them, and the

262 hate rose up in him like bile" (169). The construction of Lynch as a vestal innocent deeply intensifies the savagery of the enemy; the prevailing sentiment generated by her story is the rhetorical How could they—she's just a little girl!?

As Klaus Theweliet mentions in his analysis of the "white ladies" of masculine fantasy, "Behold: it is women who contribute so much of the raw material for the concept of 'hope.' This may be the most benign way of disembodying them...Here again they are made into building blocks not for the emerging kingdom of soldier males, but for the human society of tomorrow" (168-169).

Theweleit explores the familiar virgin/mother/whore triumvirate governing female classification from the soldiering perspective, adding that the key ideological value of the innocent woman is that she "serves as a pretext for murder" (34).

Like Bunke, we are meant to react to accounts of Lynch's ordeal with a certain conditioned horror and an appropriate corresponding vengefulness; Lynch, after all, is supposed to stand in for everybody's little sister, a girl-soldier whose affinity for beauty pageants and pink bows identifies her as the prototypical "Princess."

Bragg, in a chapter aptly named "Princess," makes a point of detailing Lynch's girl-ness with anecdotes such as the following:

Jessica tried out for the cheerleading squad in middle school, mainly

because she thought she would look good in the outfits, and made it. But

the school decided that year that the girls would cheer in shorts and T-

shirts, not the little pleated skirts, and that offended Jessi, her mother said.

She would never cheer again. (27)

263 Lynch's story aims for something beyond the typical underdog sympathy; as noted above, Lynch is not a fighter and is not expected to act "heroic" in the traditional military sense by killing the enemy. Departing from the earlier attempts to shape Lynch by the ethic of the righteously violent hero, the popularized view of her passive role in her ordeal would capitalize on her physical smallness and assumed weaknesses, and featured these prominently as the foil to her occupation as a soldier: "Her fatigues swallowed her like a huge frog. They sagged everywhere, and her cap rode low on her nose" (Bragg 37).

Circulating pictures of Lynch, including the one used on the cover of Bragg's biography (which fittingly shows a smiling Lynch dressed in oversized fatigues), support this particular reading of her character, as if reducing her physical presence as an adult would nullify the imposing presence of the military complex that she represents; in accepting the notion that "[s]he looked like a child who had sneaked into her daddy's closet and tried on his uniform to play soldier"

(Bragg 37), one is positioned to see her as the victim of some innocent misadventure and not as a member of an invading body. The ideological value of working this image into Lynch's story thus lies in its ability to rationalize aggressiveness as retribution for an unjust harm done. For this self-defense formula to work, however, Lynch is necessarily constructed in a cliched angelic role, whose hagiographic simulation is so complete in the minds of most

Americans that when notorious Hustler publisher Larry Flynt announced that nude pictures of a sexily posing Lynch had reached him through some of her male colleagues, people were outraged, not because they did not believe they

264 existed but because Jessica was they themselves at their most vulnerably

beautiful, a conduit at which the nation had gathered its best attributes.

Eventually, even Flynt, who has made both a career and a reputation out of

challenging the limits of protection under the First Amendment,32 would later concede that Lynch was a "good kid" and place the scandalous pictures in his

Hustler vault, lest he appear monstrous for defiling her or her mythic presence.

Furthermore, any attack on the Lynch myth constitutes an offence against

American purity—an ugly antisocial and "anti-coalition" gesture, as Larry Flynt learned—and, as such, must be equally mythic in its enormity. Lynch's alleged sexual molestation at the hands of the Iraqi enemy, for instance, has seen no direct physical evidence, but it has been offered by one biographer, Rick Bragg, that the abusers raped Lynch anally. While Lynch's sexual assault can neither be confirmed nor denied at this point in time,33 the offered details describing not

Larry Flynt's reaction to the public outrage over the pictures (of which, to this day, no one can firmly prove or disprove his possession) serves as an acid test for the sanctity of Lynch's myth: when the same proud and seasoned "smut peddler" par excellence—a man who wore the American flag as a diaper as a publicity stunt and once addressed the Supreme Court justices who presided over his libel case (which he lost) as "eight assholes and a token cunt" (Bowman n.p.)—declares that outing Lynch's sexy photos is too obscene even for him, it is truly difficult not to associate his sudden concern over propriety with the pervasiveness of Lynch's heroic myth. 33 Lynch herself has since changed the tone of the discussion around her alleged rape with statements she gave in her testimony before the Oversight and Government Reform committee in April 2007. While she had previously noted that she had doubts about the rape having taken place (as she was unable to remember being assaulted) and was opposed to Bragg's inclusion of the claims that she had been sexually abused by her captors (Faludi 191), she said during the hearing that "[fjollowing [her] rescue, the doctors at Landstuhl, Germany found in a physical exam that [she] had been sexually assaulted." She repeated these details in the summer 2007 article referenced in the introduction to this chapter, "I'm Jessica Lynch and Here's My Real Story": On top of all this, the doctors told me I'd been sexually assaulted in my first few hours of captivity, before I was taken to the enemy hospital. I don't remember a thing from that time. But I believe it's true. I'm still looking for answers about exactly what happened. Probably I'll never know. The Pentagon's report on her condition following the rescue did not list any such details referring to the alleged assault; however, the severity and nature of the injuries that were covered by the Pentagon release and which were later confirmed as consistent with those expected in a vehicle accident scenario further problematize the "was-she-or-wasn't-she-raped" question. Several 265 just the possible violation of rape but of anal rape stress the "deviant" nature of her assailants; when Bragg adds that "[t]he records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead" (96), it is conclusive, then, from this argument that the

Iraqis are savages who undoubtedly raped a wounded soldier, possibly after breaking her body34, and not just any soldier, but the purest of the pure, a young woman whose avowed chastity compelled her to hold hands coolly with her boyfriend on their dates to Wendy's. So strong is the emotional response to the suggestion of Lynch's perverted sexual violation by the Fedayeen that evidence is not necessary or even really asked for.

The strength and integrity of Lynch's mythic innocence and the transformative emotional appeal that her story captures and directs is not limited to the friendly reader, however, as the narrative has as one of its more ambitious goals the conversion of the Other. One successful "convert" can be found in the figure of Mohammed Odeh al-Rahaief, whose autobiography (co-written by Jeff

Coplon) reads like a companion text to Lynch's biography in its recollection of events from the viewpoint of an abruptly sympathetic Iraqi bystander:

witnesses at the Iraqi hospital that provided Lynch with care, including the orthopaedic surgeons who operated on her, have made a point of saying publicly that they did not perform a pelvic examination or any clinical observations for signs of rape simply because there was absolutely no reason to believe that she could have been sexually violated: her clothing and footwear were all in place, and her injuries (which included extensive crush injuries to both legs and several vertebrae) were so serious that any attempt at a sexual assault would very likely have killed her. 34 The violent assault on Lynch by the Fedayeen that Bragg describes also remains unproven: the doctors who treated Lynch in Iraq and those who examined her in Germany have concluded that her injuries are consistent with those of a victim of a car accident only. 266 [An Iraqi officer] was leaning out over the foot of the bed, menacing a pale figure who now stole my attention.

I cannot say how I pictured this American POW, but I never imagined her quite as small or quite so young. She was a child, really.

Her bed had been raised to a forty-five degree angle and faced me head- on, so I could see her clearly. She was mostly covered by a white blanket.

Her forehead was bandaged. Her mouth was knit in pain.

There were two other men in the room: a note taker with a double chin, who sat near the officer, and a skinny translator with eyeglasses, nearer the prisoner.

I saw the officer look to the translator. Whatever he heard did not please him. Swinging from the shoulder, he slapped his captive with the palm of his right hand, then with the back of it. Her head jerked back and forth; she was a poor match for him.

I could not hear the sound of those slaps, but I felt them at my core.

My heart was cut. In that flash of violence I did not see an American, some captured combatant. I saw a helpless young girl—someone's daughter, someone's sister. I saw someone facing death here, day after hellish day.

In that moment I felt compelled to help that person in the hospital bed. I had no idea of what I could do, but I knew that I had to do something. I had witnessed far more lurid crimes since the war began, but this one moved me in a different way...This girl's future still held

267 possibilities. And because I had trespassed into her life, all by myself, I

felt strangely tied to her. She was my responsibility now. (33) al-Rehaief, a former lawyer from Nasiriya, describes his decision to help the injured Lynch as spontaneous because "his heart was cut" and he felt a moral obligation to come to her rescue by volunteering his services as an informant to the US Marines; in that moment, he describes himself as changing from an ordinary man to Lynch's committed rescuer, a transformation that grants him the psychological and spiritual fortitude to shoulder the burden, risk, and pain required to save the day. One reading of this account reveals to us a rehabilitation of a wealthy and indifferent foreigner to become "one of us" by sharing both our sympathy for Lynch and our (presumed) desire to help her; al-

Rehaief is a remote actor who acts on our behalf, it seems, evidence that the savage Other can be redeemed. Another, more rigorous reading may move on to ask questions about certain omissions: the absence of references to inconsistencies in al-Rehaief s story about Lynch's treatment and rescue,35 his work with Lauri Fitz-Pegado of the Livingston Group and its founder Bob

Livingston,36 why (as his own autobiography attests) he was able to use his

Several of the claims made by al-Rehaief in his account of the rescue and its prelude remain disputed, among these the description of Lynch's physical abuse at the hands of Iraqi military personnel. 6 The Livingston Group is a lobbying and PR firm founded by former Republican House Representative Bob Livingston; at the time of this writing, one of its key clients is the Turkish government, which has paid the group $13 million dollars to lobby against formal recognition by the United States government of the Armenian genocide (Crowley n.p.). Fitz-Pegado became infamous for an earlier PR gig, her work at Hill & Knowlton PR in 1990 coaching the Kuwaiti girl called 'Nayirah' in her shocking but phony testimony on Congressional hill that she'd seen Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies. That stunt helped propel the U.S. to war against Iraq in 1991. Fitz-Pegado's client was the ruling family of Kuwait and the baby-killing claims were later shown to be false. ("PR Specialist of Debunked Persian Gulf War Incubator Story") Fitz-Pegado also helped to promote al-Rehaief s book. 268 family's connections to the former Iraqi military and government frequently and conveniently to extricate himself and his family members from difficulties imposed by both his native country's corrupt institutions at the time and US sanctions alike; however, as these questions are counterproductive to the emotional truths of the myth, this latter reading is not encouraged.

Eventually, Lynch had to realize that she no longer mastered her own memories, but by the time she had arrived at that revelation her story was being fabricated apart from her as a patriotic fable. The "long shadow of Jessica

Lynch" (Bragg) was very soon beyond her control, a situation that she expressed dissatisfaction with in her November 2003 expose with Diane Sawyer just a week before the NBC made-for-TV movie Saving Jessica Lynch was aired:

[T]hey used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong... It

hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth

about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four

people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been

the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't.

(Kirkpatrick n.p.)

What Lynch perhaps failed to see at first was that her memoirs never really needed her input; in fact, it turned out to be most serendipitous that she became an amnesiac whose memories could be built from scratch with only the least interference. Constructing Lynch's "long shadow" of nationalistic mythology comes in part from the "realness" of her that makes everything that touches her story the "truth"; divergent accounts, as al-Rehaief s co-biographer Jeff Coplon

269 points out, can in these circumstances both be correct, for "in the wake of this kind of trauma...someone could believe they remember everything and their memory could still be incomplete" (Jeff Coplon qtd. in Kirkpatrick). Ideological interests, however, stand ready to fill in the opportune gaps to inspire the right kind of remembering and proper self-understanding as munitions in a war of symbols, which every war is to some degree, but which is most evidently reflected in a crusading mode of warfare when it is made to explain itself. The

War on Terror typifies the latter and the accompanying mindset that rationalizes actions simply by remembering or not remembering, for as Bragg says of Lynch's tale of bravery, "Even if it is not a thing that anyone can prove, it makes people glad to believe it. If that is a bad thing, then what are legends for?" (15)

270 Conclusion

How the Memorial's Valuation of Nil Wins the Peace

I began my preliminary research for this project in the spring of 2003, and as an attempt to set an absolute zero for what I was sure would be a longitudinal study of memorial construction, I experimentally made two respective pilgrimages to the former World Trade Center site and the Pentagon to record a few starting observations. Incidentally, the weather itself seemed also to be at absolute zero at that time: a stop at Shanksville, PA—which held the crash site of Flight 93— had to be postponed due to the severe weather that season, and a sudden and severe snowstorm ended up pounding the northern half of the Eastern Seaboard the very week I was on the road. Notwithstanding the inclemencies of an extended winter and the misadventures that come with travelling in a beater sans pareil in extreme weather conditions, I eventually made it safely to both destinations, and saw firsthand a year and a half after the attacks that I was not too late to witness the earliest stages of the commemorative spaces' gestation.

All the busy work of clearing the spaces had been completed at that point: the

Ground Zero site had by that time been fully unbuilt, with the Pile neatly scraped down to what became known as the Pit, and the Pentagon had, by August 2002, completed its Phoenix Project to repair its damage a full month ahead of schedule and restored the outermost layer of the damaged edge of the structure

(although its progress was at the time of my visit completely obscured by a very large white tarp and more than a few inches of fresh snow). Evidence of the

271 damage done on September 11 had been satisfactorily unmade or had at least

been worked down to a managed chaos. All that remained was the building of

the memorials, and the conversations that were being had about the undertaking

of these were already by then not new ones: Marita Sturken, who currently

teaches in the Faculty of Visual Culture at NYU, describes the immediate scene

around Ground Zero as the departure point of a "rush to commemoration":

It seemed as if the urge to speak about a memorial in New York was

almost instantaneous—by the next day, even as the names and number of

the dead remained unknown, there was discussion of a memorial. In

some ways, immediate discussion of a memorial allowed people to begin

to construct narratives of redemption and to feel as if the horrid event itself

was over—containable, already a memory. ("Aesthetics" 321)

Design competitions soon followed, with the winning submission for the

Pentagon selected in March 2003, the WTC's in January 2004, and Shanksville's

in September 2005. It was expected then that all three national 9/11 memorials would be completed by the tenth anniversary of the attacks on September 11,

2011.

Now it is June 2009 as I write these words, and over six years have

passed since I made my winter road trip along the Atlantic coast to visit the

undeveloped sites. With the exception of the Pentagon Memorial, which was completed last fall (it was opened for the general public on September 11, 2008), the building of the September 11 memorials, despite the initial enthusiasm that

Sturken's earlier description captures, has been consistently problematic, and

272 their collective future currently remains in limbo for all the reasons already discussed in the preceding chapters. As the projects continue to miss deadline after deadline, and the designs repeatedly alter in directions that appear not to satisfy anybody or any criterion without contradicting another, the focus of my own study has necessarily shifted over the course of their extended ineffectualness and, likewise, my research questions have been adjusted to pursue a changed theoretical arc. The pressing central problem now around how the public is to be trained to remember what happened on September 11 is not just that memorials organized at the national level share a common directive of uniting people around some abstract democratizing objective as a step towards subsequently mobilizing this collective towards rebuilding a protective nationalist mythology; I contend that this much is true in this case and in most cases of collective memory, and I also see wartime memorialization as an intensification of this expurgating process, so that the education that memorials are established to bear reaches its destination sooner. Nevertheless, over time it has become evident to me that while my earlier forays into the research shared as their centre of gravity the notion that the mobilization the memorial effort brought about was offensive in its design and purpose—that it moved the mass towards war, towards pushing back against terror, redrew boundaries, etc.—I see that this outwards movement can also serve another, defensive purpose in counteracting the entropic inclinations of the collective itself. In his close reading of M. Night

Shyamalan's psychological thriller The Village and its portrayal of the cloistered inhabitants of a fictional "authentic community," Slavoj Zizek views the

273 hypothetical neo-Luddist commune and its battle with its invented monsters not as a worst-case-scenario-as-social critique but as a modified exemplum of an existing arrangement:

It is as if authentic community is possible only in conditions of permanent

threat, in a continuous state of emergency. This threat is orchestrated, as

we learn, in the best "totalitarian" manner by the inner circle, the "elders" of

the community itself, in order to prevent the uninitiated youngsters from

leaving the village and risking the passage through the forest to the

decadent towns. Evil itself has to be redoubled: the "real" evil of late-

capitalist social disintegration has to be transposed into the archaic magic-

mythic evil of "monsters." The evil is a part of the inner circle itself: it is

imagined by its members.... In a proto-Hegelian way, the external threat

the community is fighting is its own essence... (26-27 Lost Zizek)

It is easy enough, of course, to match a real-life post-9/11 analogue of a communal "cocooning" to that supposed by Zizek's analysis of the film: the

"monsters" needed to support the definition of a community are renamed terrorists, and the fear that these figures invoke is intended as a stabilizing influence on the collective. Both Portraits and Flight 93's fight stories gesture towards this outer territory, too, in its "communitarian insistence of the common good and shared moral values" (Mouffe 83) as a defensive measure against the

Other; by delineating the boundaries of official remembrance through a heroic narrative of the community's collective loss and redemption it also outlines, in relief, the boundaries at which this process ends and the economies of mourning

274 that justify the subjective valuation of lives, both saved and lost. The memorial's role in this garrisoning exercise is to explicate and justify this partition as a means of fostering a renewed imposition of boundaries, values and, most importantly, discipline as another instance of

an effort to adjust the mechanisms of power that frame the everyday lives

of individuals; an adaptation and a refinement of the machinery that

assumes responsibility for and places under surveillance their everyday

behaviour, their identity, their activity, their apparently unimportant

gestures; another policy of bodies and forces that constitutes a population.

(Foucault, Discipline 77-78)

However, in order for it to exert this controlling influence, it first needs to have a handle on certain quantities—what boundaries, what values, and what kind of discipline to encourage. After all, how does one build a war memorial for an unfinished war?

As the first and currently only September 11 national memorial site, the

Pentagon Memorial answers this last question at least partially by implementing a design whose elements are vague enough to disclaim the incompleteness of their content. Despite being organized as a statistical fact-list of sorts, the design itself makes a point of being non-referential, and in its role as a catalyst that

"provokes thought yet does not prescribe what to think or how to feel" (KBAS, designers' statement) this particular memorial explicitly and repeatedly invites the viewer to write in his or her own meaning in contemplating the site and its structures. This impressionistic approach to commemoration allows the

275 memorial to occupy two contradictory discursive planes at once: on the one hand, it seeks to facilitate a non-threatening "conversation" with the viewer about the events of September 11, but on the other hand, despite its proposal to avoid prescribing meaning, it fully dictates the terms of the conversation it promotes, so that a viewer invited to figure out the design ends up discovering predetermined conclusions about the memorialization of 9/11 as well as what the memorial has to teach about what happened that day. So, while the memorial is technically complete, its design takes full advantage of a scripted dialogue around filling in the gaps in its meaning and, with it, the appearance of "Architecture [that] stands as a declaration of collaborative intelligence and exerts a positive force in the world," which Pentagon Memorial designers Keith Kaseman and Julie Beckman offer as the highest self-actualizing attainment of design (KBAS statement); the object of the memorial, once we look past what the artefact is showing visitors and focus more closely on what it is doing to them, appears to fixate on a different but related set of investments as far as viewer reception is concerned.

What matters is not the nature of the commemorative conversation but the fact that such an exchange exists and that anyone who engages with the memorial must necessarily be involved in this dialogue subject to its terms and conditions.

Furthermore, the nature of the design assumes and anticipates changes in the direction of this conversation: its "meaningless" form affords it the fable's trick of being able to assume a constructive ambiguity and, thus, escape narrative accountability for any one meaning should it become unneeded, unpopular, or counterproductive; just as older fable tellers were once able to use this

276 uncertainty as a coded language for telling dangerous truths, so too can the abstract memorial be readied to deflect critical readings. The desired cumulative outcome of these strategies as they operate within the Pentagon Memorial is not the pro-social ideal of "collaborative intelligence" but the more mundane—and infinitely more useful for the times—enactment of groupthink.

Having now assessed the value of processing organized viewing into organized thinking through the memorial, I see it as rather too easy to write off the other two national memorials simply as incomplete or failed projects. Though it is true that nothing of any real import has been built physically on the sites, their promotion of a specified conformity through the effort around the building of the memorials is a considerable achievement in itself. In pulling people away from the unpredictable untidiness of individualized, personal shrines for their loved ones and refocusing public attention on the high-profile rebuild projects, the race to commemorate has largely been defined by its ability to rebrand uniform obedience as a democratic value. Like the publicly-informed effort that gave rise to the Pentagon Memorial, the planning of the memorials at the WTC and Flight

93 sites in New York City and Shanksville, respectively, encouraged community participation in town meetings and design contests, performances that were brought in to solicit public input merely for the sake of having this dialogue, as one urban planner argues:

The democratizing of planning, seen through the Regulationist lens [put

most simply, the notion that "those who were the most powerful would get

what they wanted"], is not much more than a sleight of hand, an illusion:

277 an attempt to deal with "the capitalist-democracy contradiction," that is, to

provide a legitimizing gloss to a system that necessarily works in the

interests of capital. The collaborative style of planning that has found

favour...is merely the latest adaptation of capital in its insatiable drive for

new forms of urban development and profit. Practitioners working to

improve participatory techniques on the ground will not find much joy in

[such an] analysis of planning reforms. Nor will academic advocates of

more inclusionary approaches. (Sandercock 439)

By making everyone an ersatz stakeholder, at least in the theatrics of democratic

participation, the process of memorialization effectively possesses the collective

by modelling the apparatus of capture characterized by

a new task, which consists less in overcoding already coded flows than in

organizing conjunctions of decoded flows as such. Thus the regime of

signs has been changed: in all of these respects, the operation of the

imperial 'signifier' has been superceded by processes of subjectification;

machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime of social

subjection. (Deleuze and Guattari 451)

In other words, the "rounding up" of the populace around the spectacle of public

discussion and election constitutes a process of capture, as does the prescribed

commitment to the collective effort to organize the memorial. There is a range of

opinions about how to go about completing the memorial, but any ambivalence within this closed discourse is a "'created' ambivalence about which rules should

apply and hence...an arena for contestation in which all sorts of actors could

278 claim the right to have a say" (Hajer 446); the minutiae of their details—park versus museum, above-ground structures versus below-ground, alphabetical name listings versus randomized listings, the option of not building anything at all—these superficial discussions all flow back into a common obsession with the need for an organized remembrance and its recognized formalities. Around this core concern, the "democratization" of the discussion and the polyphonic in­ fighting that imminently results to actively prevent the memorial from being built are both acceptable and compatible.

Again, if the modi operandi of commemoration are fixated on reaffirming a

"grammar of conduct" (Mouffe 85) necessary and sufficient to render a community of docile bodies, as Michel Foucault assumes, out of an inherently unruly collective, these are not dependent on the memorial's physical presence to exist; they instead involve establishing a managed situational environment in which one thing an included individual cannot do is refuse to participate.37

Jessica Lynch's life both inside and outside the community brought together by civic commemoration confirms these limits on individual conduct. Her war story typified what Tim O'Brien referred to as being "just beyond telling": her version

I refer here not just to "sitting out" through the direct refusal to join in the exhibition of patriotic mourning; participation is also contingent on observing the proper rules. An example of inappropriate remembrance is exemplified by the work of Russian-American artist Constantin Boym, whose Buildings of Disaster series, composed of small figurines depicting the sites of famous disasters (including the WTC and the Pentagon; other infamous structures that appear in the collection are Neverland Ranch, the Superdome, and the tunnel in which Princess Diana's car crashed), tested the memorial's boundaries: One would automatically assume that there was something distasteful about commemorating human disaster with what look like souvenir shop memorabilia. Yet the September 11 memorial set was hugely popular. "Literally on September 12 people were calling and asking for the souvenir building [the 1993 edition], which was almost obscene," says Boym. The piece was sold only in a few design stores -where it would be handled in a "dignified" manner - and the proceeds were donated to the September 11th Fund. This sensitivity was intended to counter the simple shock value of seeing an object like that in a store. (McGuirk n.p.) 279 could not be told because it failed to live up to the myth—both hers and that of

the national's rejuvenation post-9/11. It could not be remembered because its

content, which contradicted the purposes of its memorialization, would not bear

remembering. Finally, it was resisted by a collective that had been conditioned

not to listen; just as one character in O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story,"

when searching for a moral to make sense of his own narrative, arrives at the

conclusion that "No one listens. No one hears nothing," Lynch and others

discovered to be harbouring subversive memories would find themselves excised

from the commemorative community and the intolerant corrective discourse that

defines it.

So long as the war on terror continues its march, the attendant disputes

over how to correlate its undertakings with the commemoration of those who

perished in the events of September 11 will continue their evolution. As a

participant in this debate, I have been prompted to reflect on how I think

September 11 should be remembered; I have also been asked a few times now

what my thoughts are on the future course of September 11 commemoration.

First, I can contend that how the remembrance of the dead is generally regarded will immediately forfeit certain alternative approaches; this cultural practice, as I

have maintained through this dissertation, is one that speaks to tendencies in

how we wish to understand ourselves—tendencies that, at the right moments,

can become "switched on" and made productive in a more generalized way to state concerns. So, when asked how an event like 9/11 should be remembered,

I have to wonder if such an event needs to be remembered at all as part of any

280 formal, decorous procedure; September 11 is, in the global picture, no more special and no more illustrative of what or who America is than, say, the

Hurricane Katrina disaster.38 Of course, with the countermemorial suggestion being in this case utterly taboo, I would propose reverting to popular, unofficial memorials, such as those that sprang up spontaneously after the attacks; a memorial in this case would be limited to a place where people could gather as people and not as a territorialized movement. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans

Memorial, I feel, gestures at providing this space for personal assembly and reflection as it is

perceived by visitors as a site where they can speak to the dead (where,

by implication, the dead are present) and to a particular audience—seen

variously as the American public and the community of veterans. It is

because of this process that the wall is termed by many a "living

memorial." It is the only site in the Washington, D.C. area that appears to

be conducive to this kind of artefact ritual [the leaving of objects at the

wall]. (Sturken Tangled Memories 78)

However, the funerary respect and distance that the memorial embodied was for some interested parties not enough; it was "incomplete" as it was, according to

"several well-placed funders of the memoriaf (Sturken, Tangled Memories 56, my italics), including Ross Perot (who referred to Lin with derision as an "egg roll"

[Wu 95]) and Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who withheld the permit for

381 agree with Tim Blackmore's argument that Katrina and its aftermath are actually more important in defining America than 9/11, for the moment of disaster and all the ensuing tragedies and farces—the stark partition between who was worth saving and who wasn't—showed the nation's true face (phone conversation 22 Jun 2009). It is unsurprising that this catastrophe has been relegated to the banal, not worth remembering. 281 the memorial until it was modified to be part of a larger scheme that included a commission for a traditional statue, The Three Soldiers, by Frederick Hart; if this change in plans did not make it transparent that Lin's memorial was unwelcome, the funding doled out completed the implicit insult: Lin was given $20 000 for her design while Hart's complementary piece was allocated $330 000 (Sturken,

Memories 56). Furthermore, after the Vietnam Women's Memorial was dedicated next to Three Soldiers, other additions were proposed by other lobbyists, including a Scout Dog project (Sturken, Memories 67). So, while Lin's memorial was eventually built, its design aesthetic and governing philosophy were both finally and badly compromised to meet the state's requirements, which were communicated in this case through the funders and other "well-placed" figures. These rules, however, were cloaked in myth to appear commonsense, instead of the dogma that they were: Lin's "black gash of shame" was made obviously inadequate and in need of a makeover, and it got fixed until it, too, could be domesticated. The contestations over this piece and its unilateral resolution make up a cautionary example about subaltern memories and their imminent capture in formal commemoration that makes it untenable to me that any national memorial—for September 11 or for any other event deemed worthy of special recognition—could escape such a fate.

I cannot conclude further on these points other than by saying that it seems to me a certainty that the planned national memorials will ultimately be created and that these will take recognizable, safe shapes; other previously

"unspeakable" events, most notably the Holocaust, have had their stories—their

282 correct narratives, that is—told by commemorative objects. What specific design or form the story of September 11 takes still awaits the conclusion of the war and a subsequent inventory of its accomplishments. Until this stage presents itself, however, the solitary memorial in this case is the war memorial, to be read with war not as the complement but as the object: it is a war that aims to explain why it must be that "trauma piles on trauma" (Spiegelman 4) and, further, why we must continue to accept these costs willingly until the war on terror ends or until the next terror attack comes along—whichever comes first.

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302 VITA

Name: Elle K. Ting

Post-secondary Education University of British Columbia and Degrees: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 1994-1998 (B.A.) 1998-2000 (M.A.) 2000-2001 (B.Ed.)

The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada 2002-2009 (Ph.D.)

Honours and Awards: Province of Ontario Graduate Scholarship 2003-2004, 2004-2005, 2005-2006

Related Work Experience: Teaching Assistant University of British Columbia 1999-2000

Teaching Assistant The University of Western Ontario 2002-2003

Instructor Vancouver Community College Vancouver, BC, Canada 2004-present

Instructor Kwantlen Polytechnic University Surrey and Langley, BC, Canada 2006-2008

303