Double Double
Whammy Whammy
The Twin Traumas of 9-11 and 7-20

by Pedro Bofecillos

In this illusion that we inhabit called culture… Nooo.

In this illusion called culture that we inhabit, many (most?) of us don’t like to be reminded of certain realities concealed by the illusion: impermanence, insanity, violence. We create, treasure, and revere monuments of bronze and other durable materials, and also monuments more enduring than bronze. Monuments of reason, science, philosophy. Monuments of the imagination, art, music.

Walled off from chaos and Old Night, in these illusions we find pleasure, take comfort.

Other of our illusions, called religions, acknowledge impermanence and insanity here and promise permanence and sanity elsewhere, in a world to come.

2.
The world, this shotgun bride of time, contrives bad surprises for us. Disasters, a.k.a. acts of God.

We contrive bad surprises for ourselves. Usually our own bad surprises are ramped into and supported by clever justifications and elaborate rationalizations. Holy wars. Ethnic purifications and genocides. Wars to make the world safe for democracy. Wars against terrorism to eradicate evil from the world.

With escalation and acclimatization to increased levels of violence, even the noblest and best civilizations come to accept massive bloodshed, mayhem, and destruction.

In 5,000 years of recorded history, we’ve seen and committed just about all possible atrocities. But we are, alas, almost as good at forgetting the atrocities as we are at committing them. Most recently, we sailed in a celebratory manner into the new millennium as if the last hundred years of the old millennium had not, with its 200,000,000 war-dead, been by far the bloodiest in history.

3.
9-11 was trauma partly because of our amnesia concerning the violence of the 20^th century. But more so because it was such an utter and intense surprise, and one whose beginning, middle and end—only a couple of hours—was there for the world to see on live television.

Violence, insanity, impermanence in one massive, undeniable media dose.

Hijacked airliners we’d sort of got used to. Even exploding hijacked airliners. Even mistakenly attacked airliners. But airliners full of fuel and full of people used as weapons—that was something new.

And used as weapons to attack highly visible structures with powerful symbolic connotations—that was something new.

The Pentagon burned telegenically for a while and then allowed itself to be saved.

The World Trade Center buildings burned telegenically for a while—in the best Hollywood fashion… and then disappeared, one after the other, each needing only 30 or so seconds to vanish.

For a culture built on the denial of impermanence, that is trauma, severe trauma.

Other intense and utter surprises have happened in modern times: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Kennedy assassination, for two examples. But think how distanced they were for global consciousness. We saw the Japanese bombs only as lovely mushroom clouds; only later (and slowly) did the pictures and stories of those terrible ground zeroes emerge. And the Dallas assassination began to be erased even before Air Force One left Love Field, with the well-publicized immediate swearing-in of the next president; the tragedy of loss was felt and remembered, but given our history we are at some level accustomed to the fall of the mighty.

But not at all to the fall in 30 seconds of not one but two 110-story buildings—while we watch. A vivid, undeniable reminder of our impermanence, our insanity, our violence.

4.
For all its bloodshed, the 20^th century itself served up an event fully as traumatizing, and one with no loss of life, with no blood, with no violence.

At the time, the first moon landing on July 20, 1969, was celebrated as a triumph of engineering and derring-do. Which it was.

The returning astronauts were properly hailed as heroes, equal to Columbus or (yes) our very own Magellan. And other flights to the moon, already planned, were carried out.

But once the Apollo flights were finished, as we have pointed out elsewhere, humanity became a bunch of sullen stay-at-homes. Oh, sure, we did satellites, we did space shuttles, even a space station, and lots of distant space probes, but mostly we just huddled here under the blue blanket of our atmosphere, and watched.

The bleak, cold, airless, monochromatic lunar landscape, that black black sky. "Foreboding" does even begin to get it. For all the gamboling of the boyish astronauts—putting up flags, gathering rocks, hitting golf balls, skipping hither and thither with impossibly long steps, putt-putting about in the Lunar Rover—the intense and utter surprise of the surface of the moon was its cheerless, colorless isolation and inhospitability.

We knew before we went to the moon that we were alone. We knew that as far as we could tell with our telescopes the universe is mostly empty and where it’s not empty it’s a big mess of gases and stars and deadly radiation and on and on.

But on 7-20 we had it thrust in our faces just how alone we are, and in what a bleak setting we must live out our aloneness.

In the first flush of triumph we didn’t have to think about the harsh reality of not just the moon but of our place in the universe. Even after the first flush of triumph, we didn’t really think about it.

But notice that as soon as we decently could, we stopped going back to the moon.

7-20 shocked us into traumatic denial of our place in the universe. 9-11 shocked us into traumatic denial of our behavior in the universe.