The event, not the movie. Ya know, the tragedy, the 6,000 people dying in apocalyptic inferno thing. [This is not a political rant.]
I have to give credit to Michael Moore, for what it’s worth. I didn’t feel a thing when Mr. Kellam, the Oakridge assistant principal, assembled the student body to explain that a terrorist flew a plane into the World Trade Center, collapsing a 110-plus-story building. I was truly a desensitized, ignorant teenager: the Counter-Strike radio popped into my head, cueing the “Terrorists Win” sound that I’d heard thousands of times before and thousands more times since. I still didn’t feel anything except stupid when my father reminded me that I had forgotten about my cousin Kelly, who lives in New York – and was even in Manhattan that morning. I felt nothing but a desensitized shock when I saw pictures later that day on the Internet of the poor, poor people who jumped from the top floors and the roof of both towers. There isn’t an English word that describes the true sadness of that - I want now to blend my languages and make a word like “sad-ísimo.” I finally felt something when Moore, ironically, was censored by the MPAA and the footage of the planes hitting the towers was reduced to a black, pictureless chaos while people screamed. When the picture returned, a woman had no other reaction to something she had never even considered fathoming in her life – except to fall to her knees and break down crying.
This movie was the first thing that made me able to really put myself in a New Yorker’s shoes. The first plane struck, and the world stopped turning. People dropped what they were doing and looked to the sky in shock of the pure unpredictability of it all. Then the second plane struck and the world – the everyone-dropped-everything world that had existed for all of 45 minutes – was turned upside-down once more when the second plane hit. Suddenly, it was the first time that any native American had experienced true chaos. Where do you run to? Even if you can pick a place, who knows? A plane might hit it. Every reassurance you were ever given, from significant others to your home, suddenly no longer had its promise of security. They might be gone before you can get to them ever again. Every second of your life was now as unpredictable as when we were dumb animals just searching for nothing except survival.
This is a kind of chaos that our generation, in this country, was raised never to expect. What’s more, we couldn’t even expect it if we thought about it abstractly: the contiguous States had never been attacked, excepting the War of 1812 (which, in my humble opinion, doesn’t even count since the British weren’t fully convinced we were broken up with them yet).
But Fahrenheit didn’t keep me thinking on its own. I also had the influence of Everclear.
The band, not the alcohol.
In the last week, I finally loaded up their newest album, “Slow Motion Daydream,” which came out last year. I’ve always liked these guys, old and new styles alike. I’ve found a lot more emotional pull in their newer music. Lots attribute that to the band’s poppier edge after the turn of the century, but I still have a great (and sometimes even greater) admiration for the work and expressiveness of Art Alexakis.
The point of this change of topic? Chances are I’m looking way too closely into things, but the song “Science Fiction” has me positively captivated. I’ll save the analysis for another day, but I love the simplicity of the melody, the instrumental minimalism, and Alexakis’s familiar vocal style. So like I do with a lot of music, I looked deeper into the album. The lyrics to “Science Fiction,” while ringing true with Everclear’s post-pop-revolution deeply buried optimism, I also found a surprising amount of response-to-tragedy wordage. The words, when read in that context, had a lot in common with John Mayer’s “Covered in Rain,” a song which Mayer himself has said was written specifically in response to 9/11. Surprised, I kept looking into the album. The cover was a skyline in black-and-white. It’s not a NYC-sans-WTC skyline, but that was the very first thing that I thought of the minute I saw the cover.
So now, thanks to Hollywood and the LA record industry, I was able to comprehend a fraction of the chaos and the weight of emotion that New Yorkers felt roughly three years ago. Good job, blakerson.
Let’s go back to that chaos for a minute. What had set America apart from most other countries in the world in the idyllic youth of Gen-Y was the distinct lack of it. Look at what we saw on the news every night: from Iraq to Sarajevo to Bosnia to Kosovo, we saw people who spent every day of their lives in this kind of chaos. It wasn’t shocking; it was expected. But it was across the world from us, and just on the evening news. Excepting a very small number of people, Dan Rather’s report wasn’t able to put us in the shoes of a former Yugoslav. We didn’t really comprehend it.
On September 12th, the world cried out, “We are all Americans.” We appreciated the sympathy we once had, but the remaining 5.7 billion non-Americans made one slight mistake. It wasn’t that they were all Americans, suddenly. The truth was that the Americans had become people of the rest of the world. American dominance, the assumption upon which Gen-Y built our outlook of our world, was shattered.
Well, now America had something to aim itself for: rebuild the idyllic luxury of untouchable world domination. Over the last year, my political views have become a little stronger, and somewhere in the mix – maybe it was earlier tonight in the shower, even – I realized that my family wasn’t lying when they said they raised me expecting me to work to make the world a better place.
Back to Kelly, the oft-forgot cousin. She’s a freelancer for the Times and a teacher at Columbia’s Journalism School. Having shed light on the mysteries of a real-estate-related murder and a diamond-theft racket in the City, she’s made the family very proud. She’s making the world a better place.
It was in the shower tonight that I realized that my political beliefs and current events have left me with something to fight for, a way to make the world a better place and leave myself with a sense of accomplishment, if successful. Especially so if Bush gets four more years. Journalism, I realized, would be a fine way to go about that. Well-respected journalists have a much more subtle sort of power than a politician would, but the perk is that the constituency that a writer responds to isn’t concentrated in a specific geographic boundary. And journalism school sure beats the hell out of law school.
It’s no mistake that I started at UT as a journalism major (little-known fact, but true). It’s no mistake that I was working as an amateur writer in high school and started getting awards for it during my first semester at college. And maybe it’s freak chance that Columbia (the top-notch American journalism school) takes 50% non-journalism-majors for grad school and my own cousin is a teacher there, and I have amazing mentors from my eighth-grade English teacher to coworkers from my last summer job. Mistake or not, it’s impossible to deny that I just might have a future in journalism, and as reluctant as I was to accept that as a college freshman, it still might be true nevertheless. With everything that I’ve been given, I think I’m going to start being afraid of letting down this family of mine that set me up so well and set their expectations so high. It would truly make me happy to be the real blakerson.
The one who people think is destined to make his family proud, not the slacker who loses his life to video games.
It’s kind of like how the song “Science Fiction” suddenly ends on a happy note. Kind of like how New York City dedicated itself to getting its people back on their feet. To paraphrase Alexakis: it might be like a bad b-movie, and maybe you can’t believe what you’re seeing on television, but it’s sometimes hard to remember that life is always getting better.