2002-09-12 - 4:15 p.m.
It's been quite a week. I gave notice at my job (I have a month left, yeah!!), went in for a pre-operative appointment for arm surgery, mud wrestled, and made it through September 11th. The notice-giving was shockingly easy, and I am so immensely excited for the glory that will follow my end-date. The arm surgery is not so exciting, but next week, I will be the proud owner of 8 titanium screws and 2 titanium plates in a little jar. At the moment, they are residing happily in the end of my right radius. Not for long! It was suggested the other night that I fashion some jewelry out of the extracted hardware, or perhaps sew them stylishly onto the front of a shirt. I'm thinking something red, sleeveless, and with parallel, symmetrical rips. Any other ideas? Unfortunately, I'll have to forgo any more mud wrestling for a little while. It's a pity, because Sunday's event reminded me of how much I like to bellyflop into mud puddles with people wearing singlets.
The 9/11 anniversary came and went. There was something profoundly odd about it; it was anti-climactic in ways, inasmuch as I was expecting obscene displays of jingoist patriotism. The "day of remembrance" seemed strangely subdued and understated. I saw a number of US flags and red, white and blue lapel ribbons. There was a dramatically sparse newspaper cover page that depicted only a color illustration of the World Trade Center and the italic caption, "In Remembrance." There were two pimple-faced young men at the anti-war rally wearing flag-adorned shirts, defiantly staring at protesters and holding up their "Conquer or Die" sign and their poster of bin Laden in rifle crosshairs. Last month, I had planned on traveling to Canada on this day to escape what I was sure would be a terrifying spectacle of US righteousness, patriotism, and xenophobic flag-waving. Yesterday, for me, was remarkably painless considering the degree of trepidation with which I anticipated the anniversary.
I was almost relieved at this lack of fanfare, and at the relatively quiet passing of this day. As I reflect, though, my reaction changes. First, it was easy to move painlessly through yesterday in that my body is not one that is immediately marked as "enemy." I am white, and I'm perceived by most to be female. I'm seen as an "us" by the white US citizens in the midst of mourning the loss of WTC victims (while pointedly NOT mourning the loss of lives abroad), not as a "them." Second, the relative unobtrusiveness of the vocal patriotism that I witnessed (perhaps others had different experiences, granted I am in Seattle and spent most of the day at an anti-war rally and the Independent Media Center) is disturbing in a unique way. It's a pregnant silence, and like the subtext of the US flag itself, carries with it the violence of unarticulated vengeance, racism, and xenophobia beneath its message of "togetherness" and "unification." It wasn't the memorializing itself that disturbed me (though martyrdom in general has some suspicious implications). It was the undercurrent of the grief. The message, though hushed or unarticulated, of symbolizing sorrow and memory with patriotic symbols (the flags, pins, ribbons, clothing, etc.) is that the mourning is not so much for loss of life, but rather for a loss of very specific kinds of lives (US rather than "foreign," "innocent" rather than "guilty," and to varying degrees people who are white rather than people of color, people with money rather than people without, and so on).
Anyway. It's fascinating to remember what it was like last year, hearing the news. It was terrifying to think about my friends in New York, to wonder if everyone was okay, and the panicked hours that passed before hearing from them. I left work early, went to a couple of seedy gay bars that night and got plowed, and had a fucking blast doing karaeoke to "War Pigs" and "Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter." I didn't have a blast, however, hearing drunk queers around me talking about "blowing them off the map." I was enraged and perplexed by (and even just a touch envious of) a few acquaintances of mine that claimed no response but sheer joy at the demolition of a symbol of capitalist domination. More than anything, I was terrified and alienated by the utter lack of complexity with which otherwise critically engaged people were speaking about this "Attack on America." My boss, a sweet lefty who twenty years ago was being followed by the FBI for doing solidarity work with El Salvador and as a medical student helped to smuggle medical supplies to guerillas there wrote a message to everyone in the lab attempting to justify his inclination towards racial profiling in the wake of this event, and claimed that this was an attack on all the things that are "good about America." Nobody seemed to be able to get away from "good guy/bad guy." The thing that freaked me out the most is the obvious precariousness of people's "politics" (as these complex political positionings are simply described) when their privileges are called into question or otherwise endangered.
It was a relief to read missruckus' livejournal yesterday, about the "311 minutes of silence" that should proportionally accompany the U.S.'s moment of silence. It was also fun today to read Mimi Nguyen's take on inappropriate feelings and the link to the salon.com article on the same. Still, there is something that feels not-quite-right about various ways in which people are attempting to resist all the bullshit. For example, I do NOT want to see or hear of the white women dressed as Muslim women (which, I do not believe they are) with white masks adorned with black tears and signs reading "Our Tears Are For Everyone." I echo the sentiment, but not the culturally-appropriating and highly problematic vehicle of communication.
My favorite little web-find today, however, was the kareoke version of "Under Pressure" I found: an instrumental version plays and the words appear on the screen, going from white to fuschia as the song progresses.
Also, I won a Coke today. I buckled today and drank some of this evil elixir of globalization. If I don't redeem the one that I won, does that erase my initial purchase of it?
I have to run to go get the first in what will hopefully be many of my coworkers taking me out for my end-of-the-job beer.
