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September
28, 2001
When Language Fails
By John Troyer
In the 17 days since two planes flew
into the World Trade Center, a third plane flew into the Pentagon
and a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, I have read the
same story, in different news sources, attempting to create
a language that adequately describes the events. While every
term imaginable to describe violence, death, grief and anxiety
is still in use by most Americans, the words are not helping
to make sense of the situation.
The rhetoric has been thick
and the critical analysis rather thin. In response to this persistent
repetition of language, a letter to the editor in last Friday's
Daily ("Make no mistake," Sept. 21) requested everybody
stop using the same rhetorical terms about the Sept. 11 events.
I found the letter's point quite compelling in expressing a
frustration about the inability to accurately define a 17-day-long
stream of transient information.
The language of everyday life
seems entirely irrelevant given the inability to even categorize
Sept. 11, 2001, as anything other than Sept. 11, 2001. Days
of infamy have come and gone; let those dates remain defined
by specific events outside the scope of 17 days ago. Sept. 11,
2001, is a singular day that resides in the present without
a proper name, embedding no specific meanings other than that
words do not adequately articulate the shock of two planes flying
into the World Trade Center, a third plane flying into the
Pentagon and a fourth plane crashing in Pennsylvania.
The accustomed uses of language
to make impossible events seem real for the American public
via television, newspaper and radio sources are breaking down.
I use the term "breaking down" while fully recognizing
the almost unanimous support given to President Geroge W. Bush's
address to Congress and the language used to define a new war
on terrorism.
While the president's speech
might have satisfied most consumers, it exposed more than ever
the fact America is intellectually ill-equipped to critically
handle information regarding the material results of foreign
policy failures in American history. Not only was a discussion
of history absent in the President's address, but also the events
causing the speech to occur seemed outside of any historical
context. The United States of America, a vocal majority of
viewers seem to naively believe, is a country beyond the anger
of other nations and populations.
Part of the critical and intellectual
deficit causing so many problems is a pervasive American cultural
mediocrity that does not examine the specifics of how one day
in American history could be anything other than a list of
previous historical events. My use of the term "mediocrity"
is deliberate and I think long overdue in discussing the education
expectations for most American citizens.
America is a country without
any national direction towards a critical awareness of world
events in the past and present. How many Americans even today
understand how the last U.S. presidential election managed to
appear before the Supreme Court? In the modern American push
to standardize any and all forms of education (something I do
not entirely disagree with in theory), policy makers standardized
critical thinking, effectively homogenizing a concept of critique.
My use of the term "critique"
simply implies picking a situation apart to examine the component
parts. That production of critical sameness made settling into
an almost elitist mediocrity quite comfortable and simple to
achieve. As a result, the only methods many Americans have used
to explain what happened Sept. 11 are overstated emotional
appeals, comparisons to the past, and a menacing nationalism
that uses the term "patriotism" to not-so-effectively
obscure xenophobia.
The emotional appeals are to
be expected, and I think will subside, given time. I am well
aware of the shock and bereavement unexpected death causes for
any person. To repeatedly witness the shock of death on television,
hour after hour, only compounds the situation.
When appeals to past events
begin to linger, however, the specificity of the present becomes
hampered by nostalgia for a more noble time. The more noble
times, now apparently the late 1980s and early 1990s, are systematically
coupled with an emotional fervor that effectively suppresses
the larger question of how specific historical situations produce
current events. To begin articulating the last seventeen days
means listing the foreign policy failures in American history
since at least the Carter administration, if not before.
Ten years ago, when the United
States committed troops to Desert Shield and then Desert Storm
in the Persian Gulf, I said the same things: Military action
would produce nothing but long-term problems with many Middle
Eastern countries. The American public did not even attempt
to think through the failure of U.S. foreign policy then, and
I do not expect they will see the problems now.
When critics ask if people
have learned anything from the past, I firmly believe the answer
is no. The incentive to make emotional appeals to the past resonates
far better on television before Congress than to list how American
foreign policy has failed to not disrupt relations in the Middle
East. The reason these lessons are systemically ignored is a
broader cultural inability to admit any kind of failure for
American history.
An act of failure is a fundamentally
un-American activity, so it should come as no surprise failure
never enters discussions of current history. The national discomfort
in admitting and discussing that American history is full of
widely ignored policy failures could cause an unprecedented
social upheaval. Who in America wants a re-examination of history
when everybody is supposed to return to an everyday way of life
almost entirely focused on a modern manifest destiny of success?
National unity is always easier to rally when violent events
affecting millions of people are defined as being without precedent
or provocation.
To be clear, I am entirely
distraught over what happened on Sept. 11. My anxiety related
to these events, however, is quickly turning to anger as I witness
what could have been an important opportunity now receding _
which is, the chance for many Americans to ask critical questions
on a national scale about foreign policy decisions past and
present. I am hopeful, in time, the violence of 17 days ago
will compel more American citizens to seek out information sources
that critically examine how from Sept. 10 to Sept. 11 the words
used to describe everyday life entirely changed in meaning.
Finally, for the critics who
will state I am betraying the loyalty I owe my country by voicing
dissent, I am hoping to assist others already working in New
York City. I have volunteered to travel with a group of funeral
directors and licensed embalmers to New York City to begin retrieving
and preserving human remains for the Mortuary Disaster Organized
Response Unit of the U.S. Public Health Department.
Dead bodies and body parts
are, for me, what remains of a historical moment on Sept. 11,
2001. The American public needs to spend time critically thinking
about the remains of Sept. 11 before blindly accepting other
avoidable and more dangerous failures in history. CP
John Troyer is a columnist for the Minnesota
Daily, where this column originally appeared.
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