Remembering What?

This past weekend, the country was on serious memory alert. We remembered the people who were killed in Manhattan when two commercial airliners transformed the Twin Towers into the hijackers’ strange form of paradise. We remembered the brilliant strategy of passengers on Flight 93 who insisted they would meet their maker in the mud of Pennsylvania not in flames at the White House. And we remembered the terrible mess at the Pentagon: an unexpected invasion of coach and business class passengers into the offices of generals whose main concern was improving relations with the former Soviet Union.

But memory is a slippery business, particularly when the events being remembered are spectacularly gruesome. Are we thinking about the past or are we reliving the trauma of watching men in business suits fall from the sky? Are we trying to make sense of what happened so that we can be better prepared for the next attack or are we indulging in the national pastime of victimization?

To enhance the experience at the September 11 museum, planners are considering an “immersive” area, where, AP reporter Amy Westfeldt writes, “visitors will hear, see and know what Sept. 11 really felt like.” Step into the room and you’ll hear police sirens and people screaming. “You’ll feel like you’re in the buildings. And then they’ll fall.” Memory in this case has been confused with reenactment. We remember the fallen by feeling the 90^th floor give way.

Memory offers us the possibility of learning from past encounters. From the distance of time, we notice new things about an earlier situation, opportunities that we overlooked the first time through. Revisiting the past is a crucial part of character development. We become who we want to be by weighing and considering the habits and prejudices of the person we used to be.

 When it comes to traumatic events, however, memory is a wild-eyed hijacker. One minute we think we are following a five-year plan, making the sort of arrangements that grownups make, and the next minute we’re up to our eyeballs in grief and rage and terror. The ground drops away and any plans we might have had are abandoned to the delirium of an emotional attack. Who can think about the future when we feel so much about the past?

Had things gone differently in the last ten years, we might have had less need to wrap ourselves in these seductive feelings. If the economy had stayed strong, if college graduates had a better chance of finding a job, if the housing bubble hadn’t burst, maybe thinking about the future could keep the plane of America from being hijacked by wild-eyed emotions.

But we’re not a future-thinking country anymore. We’re an emotional country, more interested in indulging our outrage and hatred than in carrying out a five-year plan. That became clear this past summer when members of Congress indulged in temper tantrums rather than recalibrate the debt ceiling. It hit home for me on Saturday morning as I drove my son to Boston, the first leg of his journey to Guatemala. We passed a pickup truck parked in a lot on the corner of Washington Street and Canal, “Obama, go to hell!” scrawled across the windshield.

Feelings have their own logic. The immersion room planned for the 9/11 museum doesn’t have to get all the facts right. It doesn’t have to tell you how many workers in the World Trade Center were practicing Muslims. It doesn’t have to educate visitors about the effect of world trade on developing countries. All it needs to do is reduce a thinking person to a bundle of nerves. That’s what it felt like ten years ago.

“An immersion room?” wonders Westfeldt. “Who needs one. Ten years after it happened, Sept. 11 is everywhere. … The entire nation remains an immersion room.” Westfeldt points to a StoryCorps app for your smartphone, an oral history for every victim of 9/11. Wikileaks has made available more than half a million text and pager messages sent on that day. Thanks to YouTube, we can replay the day the towers came down over and over again until we are stunned beyond language. We can feel so much we get beyond feeling into a state of numbness where thought itself is only a distant memory.

Who knows why the author of “Obama, go to hell!” scrawled those words across the windshield. Maybe the artist was a disenchanted supporter, angry that Obama caved to corporate interests. Maybe the writer of windshields was a Tea Partier who hates anyone in Washington. With feeling at the helm, we don’t really need to know. What matters is that we feel the rage of the message. The traffic on Canal Street was immersed for a moment in a very angry person’s feeling.

Jacob’s ticket to Guatemala City was remarkably cheap. Not many people wanted to fly out of Boston on the tenth anniversary, too many feelings attached to that date. Guatemala City is immersed in its own reign of terror. The presidential election was on September 11 and all the candidates vowed to rule with an iron fist. These same candidates are also heavily funded by the drug cartels, but the electorate is more interested in feeling safe than in thinking about corruption.

I’d like to say that voters in the United States still have their wits about them, but there’s too much evidence to the contrary. That’s not to say that we aren’t thinking through local problems, such as how to clean up after Tropical Storm Irene, but when it comes to national politics we’re all in the immersion room. We hear the sirens, we hear the screams, we feel the floor give way and we stop thinking. As long as 9/11 is the defining moment of our collective memory, there is no reason to think about the future. It’s so much simpler to hit replay and be hijacked once again.

Meg Mott teaches at Marlboro College. Comments welcome at: www.megmottshottopics.com.