Well, it’s September 11th again, and an election season. I find I have a hard time knowing what to say. We mourn a tragedy that has lost any cohesive story to give it meaning. It is rote now, at least in the younger generations coming up after me, to make 9/11 jokes. I’m no scold. I have laughed at 9/11 jokes myself. When they are funny, it’s precisely because they’re in bad tastes. Yet, there is a hollowness there I’m uncomfortable with. It’s one thing when a veteran uses dark humor, another when some whelp imitates him. The jokes often feel not so much the sardonic pun of a soul wearied by senseless bloodshed but the prattling of ignorant children. Perhaps I have become old and grumpy. I admit, I fear I have lost the plot, but I don’t much cotton to the cheap cynicism of my juniors. Is there sentiment without sentimentality? Is there room in our brave new world to be sad? To be silent and sad? People are dead, have been dead for most of my life; their pain, their sorrow, their fear, and their loves, must have some weight, and if the story of our nation, the narrative of who we are, cannot feel that anymore…well, I hope it is just cheap cynicism, a costume we’ve tried on that we can feel embarrassed about later. Pray for the dead and for those who come after. If they are not to know the pangs that grip my heart when some old skyline of New York shows that forgotten silhouette, let them not have their own rude awakening and gap horribly at a screen telling them that the world they had known was gone forever.
Tale Told 