This is a non-political movement. The 9-12 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created. (Mission Statement of the 9-12 Project)
Fox News personality Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project purports to be a sort of mental and emotional time machine for the American body-politic. It seems that by embracing and living 9 principles and 12 values we can return to “the place we were” — the mythical and magical mental space of September 12, 2001.
The Project offers an escape from the surly bonds of reality, politics, and history by returning to the horror and uncertainty of a state in crisis. United once more by our shared reverence for an angry God and our shared feelings of abject terror, we will forget all social, class, and political differences and journey back through time to the perfect oneness of 9-12 and the greatest nation ever created. There, in that place beyond reality and history, we will live out the eternal return of small-town parades and fireworks displays.
I don’t believe that this sort of time-travel is either possible or desirable, nor do I remember September 12, 2001 with quite so much fondness as the 9-12ers. Still, the 9-12 Movement inspired me to make a journey of a different sort. It inspired me to journey as far away from the 9-12 Project and its ideological program as possible. I wanted to understand how something like the 9-12 project — totalitarianism calling itself by the names of virtue and innocence — could be taken seriously, and how 9-11, at its heart a criminal act, could have resulted, thus far, in at least three wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, and the overarching Global War on Terror). In short, I wanted to understand the myths, metaphors, and structures of thought that now surround our understanding and misunderstanding of 9-11.
Mass romantic: Glenn Beck's appeal to das Volk.
Of course, 9-11 is only a Rorschach test, a mirror disguised as something else and held up before our believing eyes. We want life to be meaningful and when it is not or when it defies our chosen meanings, we call that disaster. Somewhere in the hazy cloud of debris raining down on Manhattan we thought we saw something: the devil’s face, American virtue, a clash of civilizations, or our own fragility. This is the reality of legerdemain: the suicide bomber is quicker than the eye. The act of flying an airplane into a building and the subsequent fall of that building are fundamentally meaningless. Viewed objectively through the eyes of god or the camera of a spy satellite flying far overhead, 9-11 is simply an event that occurred. The closely held truth of the magician is that magic takes place entirely in the minds of his audience.
In future posts I will examine the mythology and metaphor of 9-11 as well as the barbarism and irrationality inherent in how we think about it. Nothing about this is meant to be exhaustive or conclusive. I am no systematic thinker, and I can claim no special expertise on these matters. If my thoughts are confused and disordered, please consider the source and take pity on me.
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One (admittedly facile) reading of this recreation is to see it as an attempt to return to the “state of exception” created by the events of 9/11, now that many of the means to extend that state (such as the Patriot Act, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) have lost their spectacular power. In other words, rituals stand in for realpolitik, and the spectacle returns in the form of an imagined (and imaginary) unity.
Posted by Julian Kücklich | September 30, 2009, 2:19 amJulian, I think you are correct that 9-12 is an attempt to prolong or return to the state of exception created by 9-11. My own reading of Agamben has been cursory, so I invite further comment on this aspect of the American response to 9-11. What I find most remarkable about the internal state of affairs during the state of exception following 9-11 is that it was a psychic change rather than a legal or political change. The more we talked about change (“everything changed on 9-11″) the less anything actually changed.
I would modify your final statement somewhat. We celebrate ritual at home, and realpolitik abroad.
Posted by Henry Brulard | September 30, 2009, 1:57 pmI guess I just don’t get why people want to be united by hate.
Posted by Paul Webster | October 7, 2009, 1:13 amPaul, I share your befuddlement. If history shows us anything, it is that men prefer to be united, whether in hatred or slavery, sports or shopping, to being autonomous and alone. We are like the paroled lifelong convict in the prison film who, unable to connect to others or find a life on the “streets” (the world outside is depicted as colder and more alien than the homosocial, homoerotic milieu of coerced togetherness of the penitentiary) finds himself utterly alone and either ends his life or commits some petty crime in order to return to the comradeship and “love” contained within the prison walls.
Perhaps, as some have argued, this is one of the natural results of the invention of the autonomous and “free” individual. The neutralization of the old institutions–church, family, law, and “society”–conceived as freedom from authority, did not actually remove that authority, but displaced it onto the individual. Authority, once an external force, now resides in each of us: we are, each, both master and slave. Finding the world is not as we would like it to be and finding no one else to blame, we take up arms against our master, and then go willingly into the bondage of some new lord.
Posted by Henry Brulard | October 7, 2009, 11:43 amI think you have a point there, about the authority being transferred to ourselves.
I don’t mind the aloneness though. I like who I am, and I’m comfortable being with myself. I feel like people who feel this way are a minority, though, so we don’t have much say about how things should be.
Posted by Paul Webster | October 7, 2009, 7:00 pm