Media Musings: Have we learned from Sept. 11?
From pop culture to the highest brow, the nation last week sought to come to some better understanding of the tragedies of Sept. 11.
The most beautiful one I have seen develop is the Rolling Requiem, where professional and volunteer choirs sang Mozart’s Requiem starting in Australia and ending in American Samoa. This masterwork, which he did not complete because of his death and was finished and supplemented by one of his students, is a fitting use of such power to speak to us individually, alone in the interiors of our minds. The world has mourned for us by this single act of lifting up its voices in pain and sorrow. We shall not forget that.
The most powerful use of rock has come from the aging great, Bruce Springsteen, in his album, “Rising” and its huge record sales for him say to generations reared on rock that even in the musical limitations of rock music, great pain and hope can be shared by one who has always remained inside his class, the working man.
It takes no reminder to know who waded through death in New York and Pennsylvania and Washington to build and rebuild and search: the workingman and woman. It’s most fitting because rock is the power of people music, gut-level. It communicates, often, in volumes.
There was also the tsunami of the media coverage of what last week may have meant to us, what were the lessons, if any, of 9/11. The best you can do is learn to take in only that which you can emotionally afford and then turn to sitting on a porch watching the sunset or walking your dog at sunrise, as do I, and to hear nature still calling in the same voices as a year ago.
Ignore, please, the terrible spin of the Bush Administration for a week. It is the same mantra over and over again about Iraq, with informed observers knowing that reports of increased support overstate the remarks made by leaders of Germany, Canada and France. They do not want unilateral invasion of Iraq and the serious newspapers and networks have not kept the kind of doubt in their stories as required of an independent press.
When we search for the cause of the attack, perhaps the hardest observation – perhaps cold truth – is that of a Russian businessman who opined to National Public Radio that the attack was meant to rally the Arab world, which lives under the boots of an elite class that is supported by the United States, to find their freedom. David Halberstam took the same point on one of the Sunday talk shows, wondering if an attack on Iraq would not galvanize Muslim militants to attack the United States through terror.
Even a crasser view is that the Bush Administration, deeply involved by former ties to suspicious and criminal acts in the energy business, is trying to divert all of us by a call for patriotism and push off of the front pages the greatest business scandal in our history.
Then, there are the 150 books on the day and its aftermath is often shallow and gives little insight. Others, like Halberstam’s study of the human toll in one small New York firehouse, illuminate the sacrifice, courage, and relationships of those who died in a calling they loved without hesitation.
Then, too, there is the desperate attempt of local TV stations and churches to paint people who did not have any significant role in New York as heroes. If you look carefully at the New York coverage and Washington coverage, you will learn they have very strict ideas about who is a hero.
As for me, it will be the requiem and some quiet reflection on it all. No television. No radio voices. But hope still is there for more intelligent leadership, the end to a fractured foreign policy, and recognition that the world does want to help us, in its own way. The lessons from this turning point in our history are not over, but, then, neither is the American dream.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)