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And now a brief message from our regular programming...

[xkot.net] brings up an interesting observation about the rhetoric of love (and sexuality):

What I've noticed generally is that the news media have made much of passengers on the hijacked planes calling their spouses and telling them, their last words, that they love them. (Or maybe that was just the sentimental Barbara Walters report.) And I'm not trying to downplay the awfulness of these final communications. But I begin to wonder what the effect of these representations are when the news reports repeat endlessly that phrase, "I love you." I've been told that some of these parting voice-mail messages, too, have made their way from the privacy of intimate relations to the national airwaves and broadcasts. And I wonder if these reports aren't a sort of manipulation of the intense sadness we all feel for the victims and their loved ones, a molding of our ideas of what it means to be an American attacked by terrorism. Following the stories I've seen over and over on the television, do you have to be a married man or woman with a beautiful, smiling child? Or can you be another kind of person, someone not married, perhaps even gay? What do we make of these lost lives? The article xkot.net links doesn't mention Mark Bingham's sexuality. But it definitely links him to his family, to the phone call he made to his mother. What are these webs of familiarity that seem to define our humanity? Can we mourn the loss of people who live outside ties of marriage, heterosexual union and reproduction, and heirs? Can we mourn the loss of people we don't know who don't fit our representations of the American Dream?

There are so many good writers out there, so many people who can tell a story, argue a point, describe a situation in ways that bring their perspectives to life. I've been clicking my way through so many new journals and blogs this past week, trying to fill my mind with thoughts not my own. I've been unable to do "work," the kind of reading and critical thinking graduate school demands of me. It's always the first to go when something catastrophic or even mildly disturbing intrudes upon my life. I also can't focus on preparing for the class I'm teaching, commenting on student papers. But while it's been great reading all these new blogs and seeing how others are attempting to understand and deal with terrorism, I'm afraid all the new bookmarks I've made are going to occupy too much of my time...

Joe's friend asks some of the most fascinating questions. She thinks about things in ways that very few other people do, draws connections between events that go beyond publicly sanctioned rhetoric.

She wonders how we might turn to music and the arts as a way to deal with the emotions, the anger, churned up by Tuesday's attacks. She wonders whether Islamic cultures, especially in the Middle East, have parallel understandings of music's power to bridge emotions and politics. Are there songs of struggle among the people of Afghanistan, for example? Can we somehow tap into the lives of these people, appreciate what they go through each day under the repressive regime of the Taliban, by sharing their music?

On the topic of music, there are some quite disturbing songs of patriotism and nationalistic excess on the radio waves. There's a song comprised of clips of Bush's pronouncements of war and retaliation played over a militaristic / anthem-like accompaniment. I just think it's interesting how people are reacting with a sense of injured national pride. It's as if people think that projecting a strong sense of national pride would deter terrorist attacks. But terrorism operates at a completely different level. Terrorism is about killing "innocents" because of their associations with the larger entity of a nation. The more vociferous Americans are about their pride in being Americans, the more appropriate the terrorists' endeavors seem to be. It just seems to me that the more appropriate response (what does that mean? more appropriate?) would be simply to mourn the lost and express solidarity in the value of human life over divisions of nationality, ethnicity, religion, or whatever.

There's something very interesting going on with the media focus on "children" in relation to the terrorist attacks. The local network affiliates have been airing stories and question-answer sessions focused on how to deal with children's concerns and reactions to the terrorist atttacks. In some senses, this approach is incredibly infantilizing. But it also seems to be an attempt to recuperate discussions of how these events have affected all of us emotionally. It is a displacement of the fear, sadness, and anger that we "adults" feel in reaction to the attacks, but aren't allowed to discuss in public forums except as a desire for immediate, violent retribution. Yesterday, for example, a child psychologist on a local station talked about how children are more "raw emotion" without the ability to reason and "rationalize" that adults have.

Peter Jennings on the national ABC news had a remarkable forum with children on Saturday morning. I didn't watch most of it, thinking that most of the show, like the local coverage, would be sentimental, condescending "talking to" children's fears. But the kids on the show asked some very important questions. Because they weren't "adults," it seems, they were allowed to voice the questions that clearly plague many of us. They were allowed to ask the questions that are racist, xenophobic, etc. One kid asked about whether the Quran indeed says that killing enemies of Islam allows one to enter heaven. And clearly, while most of us understand that the holy book does not condone killing, some of us still insist on taking the extremist terrorists as representatives of all of Islam. I'm glad that within this forum, at least, the participants were able to air their fears and prejudices so that as a collective body, they could dispel myths and outright lies that stereotype Islam as a religion and Arabs as a people.

[Choire's photos] of NYC and the people are amazing, moving, life-affirming.

Yesterday my friend cried in our office. In the face of all that has happened, her beliefs and understandings of life were flaking away. She didn't know what she was doing here, now. Why teach first-year college students when they clearly are not interested in learning, not even respectful of the classroom environment to stay awake, listen, work? Why surround herself with people who don't care, who don't even seem to notice? Why live so far from her family and friends, work so hard at a graduate degree program, when everything falls apart anyways? And I had no answers for her, no consolations. She cried, and all I could do was watch.

After a presentation on the week's reading of Edward Said's Orientalism, the student opened up discussion by trying to relate the ideas of Orientalism, othering, and difference to current events. A woman in class grabbed her notebook and bag and rushed out of class frantically as some other students began to talk about their worries of the strident rhetoric of retaliation and self-righteous patriotism. Understandably, this woman was not ready to talk about the terrorist attacks in a classroom setting. The emotions were still too immediate and terrible. She left in her wake a jarring sense of utter despair over how things are, over how we might begin to return to our lives as they were.

Ironic how utterly appropriate this week's reading in postcolonial theory was: Said's work as well as an essay by Homi Bhabha. But also it brought back to the forefront of my mind how immensely influential theoretical paradigms of how we relate to each other, how we know ourselves and others, etc. are still inadequate to deal with the fallout of terrorist attacks. Thinking about the immediate consolidation of "American-ness" and "foreign-ness" as distinct, polar entities, about the quickness with which the words "go back home" spew out of people's mouths, about the complete lack of understanding or any attempt at understanding the forces that might truly have brought us to such a horrible tragedy. And all this is NOT to say that understanding one's actions justifies them, but merely to say that only by understanding one's actions, no matter how twisted, irrational, fanatic, extremist, and plain crazy, is the only way we can deal with what happened. Only then can we address whatever the real problems are rather than displacing anger and violence onto the visible markers of racial difference, of Oriental otherness.

But my words do nothing. What can they do but sit by idly? What would justice really mean, too? I certainly to cheer on the investigators diligently and fervently tracing the leads from plane manifests, trying to find the accomplices to the suicide hijackers. And they should be found and punished. But is punishment enough? How can we make sure such terrorist attacks never happen again?

I thought this sentence from the end of an e-mail I received today announcing a teach-in about the "Attack on America" was especially thoughtful: An Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

And from my friend milypan: Do they [people out for vengeance and the invasion of Afghanistan, etc.] really think that declaring all-out war on a bunch of Muslim countries is going to make crazy, fanatical suicide bombers *less* likely to target the United States?!?

And from my friend Eric: Though it is also a little hard not to start to think already of the ramifications, such as the US response -- we see in the Middle East the cycle of violence and tragedy that comes from terrorist attacks followed by military responses, which begets more of the same...

Not much room for formulating my own thoughts at the moment, though the flow of words from peace-minded individuals comforts me greatly, even if the general rhetoric from "the public" (interviewed on the news) and speeches of our representatives veers frighteningly towards advocating sheer violence as a solution to terrorist attacks. I don't live in some sort of utopia of non-violence (though I wish I did), but I also cannot believe that violence really ever solves anything. I just do not understand the kind of anger that can lead one to wish death upon another human being; I especially cannot understand anger / fear / fanaticism that leads one to murder thousands of unknown peoples who "represent" a hated country, nation, religion, etc. I've never been good at accepting collective identities as governing criteria for my interaction with people. (I suppose part of my social-phobia is a general feeling of utter confusion and novelty upon encountering people, an inability to slot people into identities based on hearsay, appearance, or other prejudices.) To see how grand narratives of identity like nationhood and religion can mobilize extremists to this unholy scale of violence is far beyond comprehension.

I've been seeing how some critics of US greatness on listservs have been getting slammed for not being "patriotic." But the idea of how strong the US is, how good the US is, seems to me to miss entirely the point of the situation. Terrorist attacks on US civilians are a mark of some extremists' attempt to categorize us in the US as "the enemy," above and beyond whatever ideological, political, and economic effects the US might have on the extremists' countries and peoples of affiliation. And while a knee-jerk response to such a collectivizing attack would be to mobilize around that sentiment by reversing it, by claiming one's membership in a "great" US, it seems a hollow move to me. So, what of it? What really makes us morally superior as US citizens? I have running in the back of my mind an audio imprint of our Congress singing (spontaneously, so the news reported) "God Bless America" as a rousing go-get-'em show of solidarity. It actually disturbed me to hear that performance this morning. I can't really explain why -- something about the uncritical raising of the banner of patriotism only seems to me to exacerbate the problems of why extremists would think of the US as the enemy in the first place. (Can you tell I was never into team sports?)

In other words: Whether or not these extremists have any justification for judging the US and its people as "the enemy," simplistic retaliation in kind will never address the reasons for terrorism. I have to believe that it is possible to work out issues and problems, not just on a personal level (therapy), but on larger scales such as between countries, between religions, between ideologies.

It's all so unreal. Watching the World Trade Center towers collapse. All of a sudden, all that's there is a cloud of smoke and debris. The incredible disconnect between the long distance image of skyscrapers falling in on themselves and the understanding that there are thousands of people in and around the buildings. The awful realization that there are people able to hijack commercial jets with scores of passengers and crash them into heavily populated areas. I was in shock all morning, on the verge of tears, watching the television coverage.

It's incredible, but I'm expected by the university and Writing Program to convene my writing class tomorrow morning as usual at 8 am. I received an e-mail from a student saying he is "emotionally distraught" and unable to focus on anything. We won't be doing much in class, but I suppose the gesture of going on is important.

More frightening perhaps is what will come next. Will things escalate to all-out war? How will the U.S. respond? I'm very nervous about what a Bush-led administration and military will do to reassert U.S. strength on the global scene.

. . . avoiding work . . .

Back from a wonderful weekend couples retreat to Sunset Beach with Joe's [church]. I've never really been to the beach before. It was fun wading in the water. I, of course, did not have swimwear to venture further out into the waves. It looked like so much fun, though.

It was great being around a whole bunch of loving gay people. There were a few workshops for us to attend. They were filled with earnest discussions and funny / moving anecdotes about our lives as same-sex couples. All in all, a very affirming weekend.

The drive back was kind of horrendous, though, with the inexplicable detours and poor signs that threw us off onto a side road from which it took us awhile to find the main highway again. And then there was the half hour of torrential downpours. But we made it back safe and sound.

Now off to the welcoming reception for the [English department]. (Just as the weather turns grey above; thunder rumbles.)