Talk of the Towns-- Stories of 9/11

The name John Updike is for some reason familiar to me. Perhaps I've read one of his short stories or an exert from one of his novels in school for a class. Upon further investigation (Google search), I didn't find any works that were familiar, but I guess he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Rabbit series. Besides my unfamiliarity with John Updike, his short story Talk of the Towns had big ideas packed into a few words.

He uses two contradicting words "great and horrendous", which I thought was pretty interesting because I wouldn't of considered 9/11 to be anything but horrendous. Perhaps he meant great in terms of magnitude. But the next part is what really got me. This next phrase stuck with me: "...the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception." He was almost foreshadowing when he says "the false intimacy of television" since the towers were the symbols of our comfort and community much like television, and the intimacy contributes to the community aspect. None the less in beautiful weather, like people have said before the incident. He also uses imagery to tell the story of 9/11 in the phrase "...strange inky rivulets (small stream) ran down the giant structure's vertically corrugated (of a material or structure shaped into alternate ridges and grooves) surface". He must be a man of contradiction because he uses the word "pre-postmodern", which was just odd. Towards the end of the first paragraph, he explains the denial and awe that people were probably feeling at the time. He said he had a "persisted notion that, as on television, this was not quite real; it could be fixed; the technocracy (a system in which people with a lot of knowledge about science or technology control a society) the towers symbolized would find a way to put out the fire and reverse the damage". Updike makes reference to the towers appearing to "drop like an elevator" and him and his wife clinging on to each other as if the were falling themselves. This pretty much summarizes how it not only affected the millions of lives lost in the explosion, but everyone viewing it as well. They averted their eyes from the second tower crashing and watched it happen on television, like "much rehearsed moments from a nightmare ballet". That phrase was another sign of Updike's disbelief that this was truly happening to New York, since it appeared to be much rehearsed. As the rubble calms, the fear for airplanes begins to set in. "...the sound of an airplane overhead still bears an unfamiliar menace, the thought of boarding an airplane with our old blase (having or showing a lack of excitement or interest in something especially because it is very familiar) blitheness (carefree and lighthearted) keeps receding into our past". This phrase is still true today with insanely high strung security at airports. I am almost sure he is talking about the terrorists who"transposed (reverse or interchange) their own lives to a martyr's afterlife"that "can still inflict an amount of destruction that defies belief". A martyr is someone who dies for a cause they believe strongly in, but they can only be recognized after they have died. So Updike is saying that these terrorists were going into 9/11 already under the impression that they are heroes. But for heroes, they inflict so much pain that it is difficult to believe. Oh and this next phrase is insanely true. "War is conducted with a fury that requires abstraction-- that turns a plane full of peaceful passengers, children included, into a missile the faceless enemy deserves". War is played by how clever you can kill people (bombs in shoes, bombs in bags, 9/11, etc), such in this case it turns a seemingly safe plane ride into a missile of destruction. Destruction to the faceless enemy, meaning the terrorist didn't care who it killed, as long as it killed thousands of people. And what happens to the survivors? They bury their dead, try to recuperate, and make precautions to prevent it from occurring again. Updike believes this was a direct attack on our freedom. Some say we should restrict our freedom, but Updike believes that our freedom is "mankind's elixir, even if a few turn it into poison."



The next piece-of-mind article is by Susan Sontag, an author unfamiliar to me. Her approach is more of an attack on the government and media and how poorly they dealt with the situation. In some places, she even suggests that we had it coming for us.

Sontag starts out by reminding us of how ridiculous our news media really is. There is a "disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel (silly nonsense) and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators" that is quite depressing. What Sontag means is that the news is already beginning to obscure the truth of the event to a more fluffy version. The "voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize (treat someone in a childish way) the public". This statement is extremely true. The news always tries to dumb down the details to the basics when the reality of it is much more tangible and real. The news throws out statements like this was a "cowardly attack on civilization or liberty or humanity or the free world" when in actuality, it's a direct attack on a world self-proclaimed super power. And man is America one hell of a self-proclaimed super power. This would be an example of how "we had it coming". And to say that the actions of 9/11 were done by cowards is absolutely absurd. If anything, we are the cowards for moving pawns around like a chess game and not dieing to kill others. Sontag is right, the men of 9/11 were not cowards. It's unbelievable when our leaders sit and tell us everything is okay and that America is not afraid when we can't even bring a damn water bottle on an airplane or wear a turban in an airport without raising tension. When Sontag states that "this was not Pearl Harbor", I am a little confused. I don't understand what she means by that statement since Pearl Harbor and 9/11 have many similarities and a few differences that she could be referencing. My best guess is that she's referring to the time frame and peruse of post-actions. In Pearl Harbor, we put Japanese Americans into camps out of fear, but we did not do this to Muslim Americans after 9/11. Behind all of this madness is a "robotic president" and public officials saying no more then that they support the president. It's almost as if public officials are robots themselves! Sontag suggests that action needs to take place in the government to improve our intelligence in the Middle East and our intelligence at home. We aimlessly agree with our government because they are the ones that line up the facts to fit their argument. I thought it was interesting that she stated that "the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality". Literally, we will have to deal with the destruction and blow back of 9/11 directly. It is more the government that doesn't have to deal with the reality. For heavens sake, the government could care less about the millions of lives and families that were destroyed, they care too much about dealing with us on a pandemic level then personal. Public officials shower us with grief management that has really become psychotherapy like Sontag suggests. Sontag poses a good question; Who doubts that America is strong? I mean really, we're a world super power. I too, don't find the phrase "our country is strong" to be as comforting as it should because it is repeated so much it has lost it's meaning.

Both of these articles were short, but they really packed in a lot of fear, anger, confusion and other emotions that Americans felt at the time of 9/11. They were slightly opinionated, but I enjoy hearing other people's views.

Thanks for reading!

Annotated Articles (Copy and Paste into URL): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B76mZL1iTViyM3F1VllxTUVoTEU/edit?usp=sharing