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make meaning a non-renewable resource
Wednesday, September 11 2002
The wind howled today with a strength I've never seen in Brooklyn. It blew so hard that the sturdy iron back door was blown free from the coathanger hook that holds it open, causing it to slam violently shut. It's a very good thing that nobody was standing in the way when it did this.
[REDACTED]
The big news of the day was that the bid we've put on our dream home up in Hurley has survived a "48 hour kickout" period, meaning that it's pretty much a done deal. All we have to do now is sell this place, close on Halloween, and then move all of our shit. Gretchen was obsessed today with tallying anticipated expenses and surfing Lowes.com, where she priced things such as flooring, doors, and bathroom fixtures. I'm happy things are all working out much more quickly than they did for the condo Bathtubgirl and I bought in Los Angeles, but I'm a little overwhelmed by all the things that we'll need to do in our 4,500 square foot dream home.
I've been avoiding watching the television all day mostly because I derive no joy from the spectacle of September 11th exploitation. If I have to watch another phony at a podium crying deliberate public tears for the benefit of his political career, I'll go fly an airplane into a building myself! I've long since forgotten the non-ironic empathy I experienced back when the shit went down a year ago. Across the ensuing months, that feeling seems to have faded right along with the countless cheap flags increasingly tattered by the wind. Once I might have felt rage about fundamentalist Islamic fascists messing with my city, but now, judging by John Ashcroft's muddy boot prints on the Bill of Rights, it's clear which fundamentalist fascist I really need to be fearing. Finally there's the reflexive droning of the increasingly meaningless words used to fabricate our collective memory of what happened. Do "bravery," "spirit," "patriotism," "God," "heroism," and "evil," really mean anything when these words are used more to hide meaning than provide meaning? Given the dismal official methods for remembering, it seems more tasteful and authentic to forget.
I haven't listened to any of the September 11th speeches, but from what I've read, the opportunity is mostly being exploited for crass marketing ("Let's bomb Iraq!" and "Buy - don't just download - the American Idol single!").
What little is actually being said about September 11th in today's speeches isn't even being said about the event. What's being said is actually being appropriated wholesale from the words of real leaders from our past. That's right, nobody's ghost writer is being asked to write a speech that touches on September 11th. Instead, official speech-givers are recycling such reliable classics as the Gettysburg Address and FDR's "Four Freedoms." It seems nobody alive today is considered up to the task of expatiating on a truly modern tragedy, so we are forced to further mine the past for its heavy deposits of meaning. Somehow our leaders have even found a way to make meaning a non-renewable resource.
In celebration of the successes with our new house purchase, tonight Gretchen went out and got drunk with Sarah the Korean (who is not actually a Korean). This is actually the second night in a row for Gretchen to drink to excess. By the standards of my alcohol consumption, it's nothing special, but by hers it's a rip-roaring bender.
I went out to take Sally for a walk and I found the air had grown suddenly cool. It felt - and smelled - like the first day of autumn. Interestingly, my first thoughts on September 11th of last year was that "it feels like the first day of fall." And then the falling began.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?020911 feedback
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