Making 9/11 pay

Where I work, we get a lot of advance copies of things. We get advance copies of books, usually uncorrected proofs and wrapped with bland paper covers. Our TV critic gets next month’s television episodes, rough cuts with no background music or featuring a rolling timecode in the corner. The music critic gets boxes of promotional CDs, most never opened.

With the one-year anniversary of 9/11 coming fast, the critics have been flooded with 9/11-related stuff. Our book critic has been hit worst of all, I think. According to a recent article, he’s been facing down more than 150 books connected some way, shape or form to 9/11.

It’s like garbage. Once you pick up a piece by the side of the road, you suddenly notice every other scrap of paper, errant plastic bag or discarded soda can. Without warning, you’re surrounded. For me, it happened one recent Saturday in a book aisle at a nearby store. Row after row of books by journalists, policy experts, even the widow of one of the hijacked airplane victims. Books full of eyewitness accounts. Tomes staffed with pictures. It’s all there, covering every angle of an event so documented it’s the literary cousin to an eclipse, blocking out the original event itself and all trying to grab your attention and vie for your memories and heartstrings.

And that’s the trouble with the 9/11 nostalgia trade. Besides the fact that a grim majority of victims are still buried at the Pentagon, a Pennsylvanian field and at the World Trade Center site, 9/11 belonged to all of us in global proportions. Those with access to Webcast or TV caught the towers falling and countless replays of the planes hitting the towers. Those without television read account in their newspapers. Those without the printed word traveled the information by word of mouth, no doubt seeing the anguished reaction of the listener.

Like the premise of the Akira Kurosawa film "Rashomon," everyone will take something different away from the event: Love, disgust, hate, fear and hope. You can’t mold that into a shape, put it into a box and try to sell it. Sept. 11, 2001 will forever be, for living Americans, one of the most frightening moments that we’ve collectively lived through. It symbolized vulnerability, pain and fear along with brotherhood, sacrifice and love.

And people merely near the Twin Towers have their stories, brushes with death and the yearning to be close to fame in a fame-driven culture, but it's the destruction and the loss of those in the towers we come back to...and there's our desire to know their stories. Maybe it was to prepare us for our own demise. Did they feel pain? Did they find peace in the closing moments of their lives? We want to know, because we grafted our lives onto theirs. Through live TV, transference took place. What if we were in the towers?

And so, we line up to by crap, stamped with images of the burning towers or maybe some fireman hoisting the American flag at the World Trade Center site, recalling images of Marines on Mount Suribachi. Valor, glory, honor, hope in the face of unbelievable losses. All perfectly crafted to tug at your heart and clean out your wallet.

Is this the way the dead want to be remembered? With a T-shirt or a song? Can one woman, wife of the man who drove the words "Let’s Roll" into our lexicon, seriously expect to be the voice for the 9/11 victims and their families with her new book? Of course, these are all trick questions. The dead are dead. They don’t care how we remember them. We only buy souvenirs to show off to each other where we’ve been. With 9/11 memorabilia, we’re showing off that we’re proud of America and that we will "NEVER FORGET," and we have the $20 T-shirt to prove it. We buy the crap to soothe our souls, to take part in the mass acceptance movement called patriotism. We have $50 coffee table of 9/11 disaster photos to take over when the shirt becomes too threadbare, like the tattered flags on our SUVs.

But remember, a souvenir, especially something like a book of pictures, is trying to make you see what it wants you to see. You aren’t remembering your own experiences, but grafting your memories into the handiwork of competent photographers, skilled layout artists and hand-working editors who are crafting not what to remember, but an experience of an event…a "best-of" scrapbook of 9/11 dust, mayhem and pain. It’s the hideous side-effect of the "NEVER FORGET" mantra: You won’t be able to forget, but you won’t have your own memories either. Like the androids in the film "Blade Runner," you’ll have built-in memories from someone else’s life.

How much memory is enough? Should we each buy the rights to one name, one history of the 9/11 deceased? Shall we carry their names around in our wallets? Should we buy books and videos whenever they are offered on television or at the store? What about those in New York City who lived through the nightmare watching the towers come down in their neck of the urban woods? Are they exempted or should they have to buy double to soften feelings of survivor guilt? How much is enough? When have we done our part to materially remember 9/11?

Every year, usually the day after Thanksgiving, there’s something called "Buy Nothing Day," a campaign by those concerned about our bloated consumer culture that goes into a blasphemous overdrive as the holidays approach. People are asked to refrain from the buying spree for one day, instead putting their money and energy elsewhere.

Instead of going out on Sept. 11 and spending $20 or more on the one of the legion of Sept. 11 books or commemorative items(including that by-proxy new Bruce Springsteen album) drop some cash to a charity. Make it 9/11 related, if you want, maybe Amnesty International or UNICEF. The environment needs your help. Or you can give locally to your local women’s shelter. Don’t turn 9/11 into a seller’s market. Treasure your memories by not swamping them with glossy images or ghost-written words or share them with friends and family. Give them a hug and remind them you love them. It’s your call. Don’t let anyone tell you 9/11 has an official spokeswidow or song or book. Your views matter, too.

But no matter how you remember 9/11, I think the best thing to do is ask "Why did this happen?" and "What can be done to peacefully curb terrorism around the world?"

While some will wrestle with the sudden loss of loved ones due to 9/11, the rest of us on the fringe continue to struggle with questions of faith and safety. That’s the true souvenir we got on 9/11. And no amount of collector’s editions of newspapers, books by the unofficial widow of 9/11 or special anniversary T-shirts will mask that cold fact.

And yet I wouldn’t say all the mementos associated with 9/11 are for profit or designed to be "the definitive collection" of something.

A couple days ago, I got a flyer from the American Red Cross thanking me for my donation after 9/11, an act duplicated by zillions of others. It’s a simple mailing. Unfold the envelope and inside, on an 8.5" by 11" sheet is a thank you from the Red Cross CEO. Unfold it once more and on the 11" by 17" sheet is a crude but heartfelt crayon drawing by a child named Katie, who drew a picture thanking the Red Cross for helping those displaced by the Sept. 11 attacks.

I could be cynical, thinking that it was a carefully crafted by an art department to make me go "awwww," thus making me shell out more dollars to a charity eager for cash. Instead, for some reason, I didn’t throw out the flier. I’m holding onto it, glancing at it as I write.

And I write, I figured out why I didn’t toss it into the recycle bin. It wasn’t begging for my attention with pictures of firemen or the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. It didn’t have an American flag or yell at me to "NEVER FORGET!"

Instead, it just said thank you. Thank you for lending a hand without question in our nation’s darkest hour in years.

You’re welcome.