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how tiresome this compulsion to fetishize is.
how i give into it myself.
i was teaching at the university of pennsylvania. i heard it in the book center, on the radio. a few hours later is what i remember, walking through houston hall past multiple video monitors seeing groups of students staring, saucer-eyed, at the repetitions of the loop of collapse. over and over repetitions of the loop of the collapse, the same amateur footage over and over.
the university has assembled strange teams of people wearing baseball hats to wander the spaces between these ad hoc networks in order to provide some sort of service, it was not clear what, perhaps there was something understood to be reassuring about baseball hats, perhaps something else.
many many penn students come from around nyc, but i think the ad hoc networks were just that, people who were in houston hall for some reason or who had seen on their dormitory monitors and wanted to watch the repetition of the same tape loop again and again with others who also did not understand.
and i remember thinking that the chickens had come home to roost and wondered who said that later i remembered it was malcolm x.
it was a period that demonstrated the power of television even as it demonstrated its limits---the repetition of the amateur video loop seemed to me compulsive, like the folk who were working in the networks were traumatized as well and everywhere compulsive repetition reigned, draining away the content, reducing the image to image, and as that progressed and the vile opportunistic narrative of the "war on terror" took shape, reaction formation began.
soon the loop of amateur video was a kind of brand, like that little alligator on izod-lacoste sweaters that for some inexplicable reason people wear in some sectors. soon the loop was the little logo on a new style of war.
soon that brand was being imposed on all markets, and people were buying, and a kind of fascism-lite descended upon the land.
i remember.
everything about that day and the 2 that followed was disturbing: as a function of the repetition of that loop of video footage, a collective sense of being-victimized arose: the television-specific official "Explanation" happened---and it was all so transparent, so stupid, so ugly and alarming. i remember white boys driving around west philadelphia hanging out of jeeps waving american flags.
i remember thinking that everyone, all around, had gone insane.
by now, by 9/11/2008, this has been pulverized: used and abused, drained of meaning and filled again, spit back at us over and over and over.
remembrance becomes a game.
let us stop as we are required by all public machinery to remember why everything that's happened since 9/11/2001 has happened.
let us remember how the dead have been used, again and again.
let us remember how grief became cheap became a commodity became a justification.
let us remember what made this grief seem cheap, a commodity, a justification.
and from underneath all that, remember the genuine grief of those who lost people in the trade center and try to separate that from how that's been used.
it isn't easy.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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