Has anyone out there heard any 9/11 jokes, yet? I do not doubt they exist, by now, but the fact that I haven't heard one seems significant, whether it speaks to the enormity of that wound, or the fact that we still have a sense of the sacred, I don't know. I remember when the Challenger shuttle exploded in the mid-eighties, it wasn't a week or two before I heard the first jokes about it, in particular the one about how we knew Christie McCauliffe had dandruff.
When exactly does it become okay to tell jokes about tragic events? Personally, I say once it's safe nobody involved will be traumatized. That's being overcautious, I know, but Christie McCauliffe had kids, presumably, and probably a husband, and it doesn't really hurt anybody not to tell a joke.
But a reasonable response to that first question might be that it's okay to tell the joke just as soon as it's really funny. So maybe 9/11 isn't funny yet, and won't be until we're not frightened anymore.
The fact that it hasn't happened yet adds to my suspicion that most Americans live in the grip of a deep, implacable fear. My limited travel outside the U.S. suggests that the same might apply to all humans--at the very least the ones in the 1st world--but I can only speak for who I know.
I don't entirely exempt myself from this criticism. My mind turns with ease to irrational worries. Every twinge in my side is cancer, I'm sure. Now and then in a bank I plan where I'll duck should a gunman enter. In small crises, I am happy with surprise on those occasions when I do not chicken out.
But as I listen to call-in shows and read blog posts about the recent shooting, what frightens me most is how fearful we seem. We must ban guns, lock down campuses, report strange behaviors, issue identification cards. We're terrified of each other. There's a commercial running now for a new Volvo whose latest security option is a heartbeat sensor that alerts your key fob to let know if there is somebody hiding in your back seat.
Now, as fear ripples across the country, the news media, keenly attuned to our cumulative desires and deepest needs, scrambles to offer up a scapegoat, a reason, some repository for our fear. We watch, transfixed, to interviews with experts, to news anchors gleaning over press releases for small facts to add to our body of knowledge.
Remember the initial scramble for someone to blame: if the event was somebody's fault, we can punish her for scaring us, move on with the comforting certainty that the danger has been rooted out.
Remember the urgent and sustained drive to figure out why the space shuttle Columbia exploded. Or why the towers fell. If the O-ring is defective, if the design is flawed or the backup computer crashes, we can engineer the chaos away, shake our heads at the loss, bolt our doors and set the alarm, locked and loaded.
4 comments:
I think America lives in the grip of fear because as more time passes, we allow more and more of our personal security to be the responsibility of machines and outside forces (police, government, military). We don't know how we would act in any given dangerous situation, we don't have a good idea of our physical and mental abilities during stress, we doubt our abilities to handle our shit. What makes it worse is that the media pushes you to believe that everything has an answer, that everything can be explained away, so what ends up happening (to me, anyway) is that we think that things like the shooting aren't random violent acts of some loon, but something that could happen TO ANYONE AT ANYTIME!!! I may be pulling this out of my ass, but it seems like the problem stems from our refusal to accept that there is and will always be chaos in the world, and we should prepare ourselves to be able to handle what we can instead of pretending that if we just build the walls higher and deeper, we could stop bad things from happening.
Yeah, and since we've eliminated death pretty much from our lives, none of it seems real until it happens close to us.
For example, there's the fact that things like the Virginia Tech shooting happen every couple weeks in Iraq.
yes, but can it register the heartbeats of dead people?
Now, with Zombiescan 3.6 Technology. And True Coat.
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