The beginning of history
History for me began on 9 November 1989. I was 11 years old. Somehow as I sat watching the events unfold in Berlin on our TV, as this wall was taken down by people my sister’s age, a radical idea came into my head: history wasn’t just something that one read about in history books, but was something happening here and now, to someone, somewhere, some place specific. Somehow the Tiananmen Square massacres just a few months before didn’t have the same effect on my psyche- the dead Chinese students seemed incomprehensible and utterly foreign. But the Berlin Wall really punctured my sense of reality, for the young folks clambering around on the wall seemed not so different from all the punks in jean jackets my sister hung out with. Since that day, I have tried to keep this flame going in my heart, and remember that history is not some nebulous thing that happens to famous men, but the river of everyday events that washes us all along. This is not an easy thing to do in our culture. We Americans are all so bent on production and possession and progress that somehow we are content to let history be out there, perhaps in the actions of our country’s leadership, but not in our everyday lives. Douglas Coupland wrote once that the true dream of all Americans is to be denarrated, to move outside their past, their narrative, and exist in a world that is outside morality: to live after the end of history. I was thinking of all this as I was reading the 9/11 Commission’s detailed report on the terrible terrorist attacks of that day. I had a physical feeling of sickness as I read the report, not because of the evil of the attacks themselves, but because there was such a disconnect between the banality of all the little details- how the attackers hid the razor blades, the precise minute each plane was hijacked, the exact telephone communications of first responders- and the immenseness of the act, both for what it was and what it has become in our national mythology. I think the sheer intensity of 9/11 forced upon many Americans the realization that history, grand and horrible events that can change the course of our lives, is here and now. It forced us to make a narrative for ourselves. One of the scariest things for us media critics after the event was to watch the timid attempts to define this narrative by journalists, and the muscular, brazen attempts by the Bush administration. Even more scary, and interesting, was the immediate attempt by the neo-cons to make this narrative depersonal, to encourage everyone to just go back to shopping and their normal lives and not question their personal narratives too much. It struck me then, and it strikes me now, as a cowardly move. If 9/11 was the beginning of history in the US, then let us at least have the courage to acknowledge that this history involves us all, and involves each American questioning where our country goes from here.
