The author was in NYC from Sept. 9th to Sept. 15th
and this piece was written in the week after the attack.

A few days after the event, the New York Times ran an interesting article
on the advertising “industry” and its crisis. Not only zillions of dollars
a day etc. etc., but a weird effect: suddenly it seems impossible to have
advertising at all. It seems massively “inappropriate” to move product as
per usual with shrieking & insinuating, mocking & sneering, prurience
& peeping; with hate & envy masked as fashion, with greed thinly
disguised as freedom of choice.

Death and tragedy occur every day, every minute, not only in the former
Third World, even in New York, even in America. Why hasn’t advertising ever
seemed shameful to anyone ever before? The media – which cannot utter a
sound without puking up a cliché – speaks now of the waking of a
sleeping giant (meaning that we will no longer terrorism etc.) – but what
was this sleep? And what does it mean to wake into a feeling of shame?

Last week, it seems we were willing to admit that our highest social values
could be expressed in price codes (the “mark of the Beast” as the cranks
say, the “prophets of doom”). This week, we feel shame. In a Times interview
a fashion designer expressed doubt that her work had any significance and
wondered if she could go with it.

The fashion industry is also ashamed; Hollywood is ashamed; even the news
media expressed some fleeting longing for decorum & dignity & decency.

Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our meanspiritedness,
our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the body and of all nature,
our obsession with gadgetry & “information”, our degraded pop culture,
our vapid or morbid art & lit, & so on & so on? – or should we
defend all this as “freedom” and our “way of life”?

Our leaders are telling us to return to normal routines (after a decent
period of mourning) in the assurance that they will assign significance
to the event, they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they will
mediate for us with the forces of “evil”. But what exactly is this normal
life to consist of? Why do we feel this shame?

Schoolchildren (again according to the Times) ask their teachers what
it means that the terrorists were willing to die, to kill themselves; and
their teachers evade the question, saying that “we don’t understand.” And
the ad execs, they don’t understand either – they’re bewildered. Awake but
confused by a crisis of meaning. Last week all meanings could be expressed
in terms of money. Why should 5000 murders change the meaning of meaning?

A hyper-fashionable Italian clothing company uses death to sell its products.
Photographs – even huge billboards – showing people dying of AIDS or waiting
to be executed – designed to sell woolly jumpers. In this life as normal?
Should we return to it?

For a few days no music was heard in the streets. No thumping bass speakers
rattled the air, no chants of hate for women & queers, no “Madison Avenue
Choirs” hymning the celestial delites of commodities or vacations in the
midst of other peoples’ misery.

For a few hours or days there appeared no official
spin on the event, no slogan/logo in the media, no interpretation, no meaning.
We watched the cloud drift around the city, first to
the East over Brooklyn then up the west side of Manhattan, finally over the
east side as well. With the smell and the poisonous haze around the moon
came a nightmare abut the occult significance of the cloud: – angry bewildered
ghosts in a vast white cloud. And we breathed that cloud into us. We’ll
never get it out of our lungs. What the cloud wanted was an explanation,
a meaning.

But next day the spin was in, the media had found or been given its a
ndreds who died trying to save thenswer – “Attack On America”, our freedom,
our values, our way of life, carried out by “cowards” who were nevertheless
not “physical cowards” (as some official explained in the Times). Perhaps
they were moral cowards? He didn e our faculty and students of colo’t say.

Why do they hate us? A few people have asked but received no coherent
answer. Do “they” hate “us” because we use of 75% of the world’s resources
even though we only constitute 20% of its population? because we bomb Baghdad
& Belgrade without risking even one American life? because we export
a vapid sneering meanspirited culture to the world, video games about death,
movies about death, TV shows about death, commodities that are dead, music
that kills the spirit? because we’ve made advertising copy our highest artform?
because we define “freedom” as our freedom to rule & be ruled by money?

The politicians have told that “they” envy us and our way of life and
therefore wish to destroy it. Envy – yes, why not? The whole system of
global capital is based on envy. It has to be. No envy, no desire. No desire,
no reason to spend. No reason to spend, implosion of global capital, q.e.d.
But then why should the ad execs & fashion designers & sports teams
& entertainers feel this strange unaccountable shame?

And why should the terrorists have been willing to die just because they
envy our wealth & our way of life & our freedom to buy, and spend,
and waste? What does it mean?

After the Holocaust (or Hiroshima, or the Gulag) certain philosophers
said that there could be no more art or poetry. But they were wrong apparently.
We have poetry again. It may not mean the same thing it meant before. It
may not mean anything. But we have it. And who could have dreamed at the
gate of Buchenwald or Treblinka that one day we would have – Nike ads or sitcoms
about lawyers?

Is any meaning going to emerge from the 9/11 event? Without meaning
tragedy ends not in catharsis but simply depression, endless sorrow.
Our leaders “seek closure” – perhaps by killing many Afghan children – perhaps
by a new Crusade against the Saracens – and of course by a return to normal.
We’ll show “them” – by refusing meaning. We will sleep because it is our
right not to awake to confusion & shame.

Our sleep will be troubled. We’ll have to “sacrifice a few freedoms” to
protect Freedom. We’ll have to fear & hate. But within a few weeks or
months we will have buried even the fear & hate, rather we will have
transformed all that emotion to the Image, to the Evil Eye of the media,
our externalized unconscious. We’ll have sitcoms again and gangster rap and
arguments about our right to download it all for free into our home computers.
We’ll get those airplanes flying, once again polluting “our” skies with noise
& carcinogens. We’ll overcome our shame. And that will constitute our
revenge. That will be our meaning. Our morality.

COURTESY B. CHASNY!