9/11. Disconnect. Myth in progress. - By N.L. Belardes
I wrote this several weeks ago. I thought it fitting for the Nov. 2 Day of the Dead:
9/11. Disconnect. Myth in progress. By N.L. Belardes
Under the guise of history, America connects. You see it all the time. In broad brush strokes on your television sets, thoughts are painted into your mind. Through repetition we remember. Headline news repeats the same coverage every half hour. Newsweek with photos oddly similar to Time Magazine images; and stories just as watered down. You see the dilution in flag waving and shades of details constituting the big sweeping events that help us to remember the consciousness of our shared country.
We’re connected through nation-making events no matter how watered down for mass consumption they’ve become; and through camera angles as obvious as tall sheriffs and low-lifes in old westerns.
Who directed the latest American epic?
You’ve seen the leaders swagger. One deified arm swung around a retired fire captain who happens to be standing on the most tragic pile of rubble on American soil since the Civil War. If only there had been cameras…
A bullhorn. Jeans. Red, white and blue above the grey dust and black smoke. Cattle rustlers on the high New York plains stamping a new breed. Forged brands release an acrid grey-white smoke off searing flesh.
Maybe the only true grey of 9/11 was the business suits on the front lines in and around twin towers of hell and death.
Or is that idea a myth in itself?
Yet, you associate with the myth. The myth of the great government response through cinematic images Port Authority Nicholas Cages, cloned and donning the sacred cloaks and breastplates of fire gear, and suits and ties...
Sure, someone in a red tie and bloodied white shirt threw off his grey suit, cursed the fuckers who ruined his day, then flung himself into what is going to become a sea of grey dust—not even an hour later.
But then, a lot of people lost their color. They became pairs of white eyes staring from a grey blanket covering a part of New York City.
Why are you accepting the myth?
Because the common man could be you. You imagine the arms around you. Thor’s hammer swings behind the government fist thrown into the sky, while the free arm is a hug you need because maybe you struggle with food stamps, a college loan, a mortgage, taxes, a government desk job... you want to be loved by the big cheese at the top. Don’t we all?
Or are you that hateful?
The historical detail gets muddied. What happened? American society spends more time on building myths rather than on recorded history. Yes, even in today’s era of recorded technological data through black boxes, and wireless programmable controllers, history is lost.
While mythmaking grows.
Mythology.
Mythmaking is not history. True history is data interpreted by an academic community, not fabricated and coated with patriotic colors by the media elite. Too harsh of a sentence? Can you tell the difference when it’s happening before your eyes? What you don’t realize, is that mythmaking disconnects in more ways that it connects.
You get in a car wreck. You’re head-injured. Your brain must re-wire before you can think straight. It self-heals, re-wires. Only now you think you’re a trapeze artist who has escaped the old Soviet Union.
Where did the self-healing go wrong?
You don’t even know. You’re sitting in a mental institution with a head injury. It’s the people around you who know you worked for a gas company, spending most days fighting off dogs in backyards. But you don’t care. You say you’re going to defect. You can teach a new generation how to train lions to hurl from swings 200 feet in the air.
You’re given brain meds 5 times a day.
There’s a problem in the schools because of mythmaking. Children enter college in disbelief, having lived their youth under the cloud of the American myth. Most don’t bother to unravel the cloud’s tentacles.
Most people think CNN and grade school history are the gospel. Including those who never go to college.
Recently my kid came home thinking North Korea was about to nuke the U.S.
No. “Are we even sure they detonated a nuclear weapon?”
“We talked about it in almost every class.”
“Right. And how many of your teachers are even half the news junky that I am? Show me evidence of a nuclear detonation. Just because the media and North Korea say there was a detonation, doesn’t mean it happened.” How many live under the cloud of myth? (Just today I read articles that doubted the power of the detonation)
“They tested a missile. A friend of mine said they could hit Alaska.”
“North Korea wants free food. Why would they want to bomb the country who could feed them? Do your teachers read more than CNN?”
George Washington, Daniel Boone, Christopher Columbus, Paul Bunyun, Abraham Lincoln, Chiang Kai Shek, Ghengis Khan, Ed Jagels, Arnold the Terminator. Kim Jong-il as Dr. Evil/Goldfinger…
These myths infect society to a core on every imaginable level.
Did George Washington cut down a cherry tree?
Parson Weems fully embracing filial piety said he did. He didn’t. Washington didn’t want to do half the corporate leadership projects he was appointed to. Can you imagine him in that mythical grey suit?
I was in an online argument with a popular author recently who wrote about Lincoln being a man of goodness and an emancipator.
“Show me where Lincoln ever said he wasn’t against slavery.” He wrote something of the sort.
Forget historians’ interpretations. I told him to google original source files regarding the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Lincoln admitted he wasn’t against slavery in the South or in Washington. He just didn’t want slavery expanded. At the moment, that would have thrown two distinct economic, social, and political systems into misalignment. That’s laissez-faire. He wanted to leave it alone.
If Lincoln could have won the Civil War without ending slavery, he would have.
And if Lincoln’s personal views were vehemently against all slavery, then he was flat out lying in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which were supposedly personal views, not just laying out demagogic political platforms.
Aren’t political views supposed to be personal views?
The author never answered back.
I like the author. He’s passionate.
But Lincoln’s no great emancipator except that he signed the check.
Buffalo Bill Cody isn’t my hero either.
Nor Winston Churchill or Stalin, or Lenin, or Marx (Sorry Sal) or McCarthy.
Recently I received a letter from Joe. He’s the author of a 9/11 memoir written five years after the event. He wrote a similar response on Paperback Writer:
I thought I'd stop by to say thanks to Nick for re-posting my story and all of you, his readers, for your comments. You never know where your words will end up when you drop them off in the big ether. Or, if your words will form a bridge of connection across miles or years. I don't walk around re-living the day but the process of writing put me right back there. I'm not nearly as matter of fact about it either, though after reading back through my post, I can see how I might have come across that way. Blame it on some level of self-protection still at work. I can say that it was much harder to edit than to write. Deciding which details to include or leave out at times felt like betrayal.
Why did I post that piece after all these years? Acknowledgement maybe or trying to reconnect myself. Maybe as Nick said, it might be for healing but truthfully I don't know. I do know I find something missing when I hear 9/11 discussed. For all the media noise there is an awful lot of silence about some things. The mythologizing began within the first few minutes and I'd like to see that kind of nonsense just go away. Fat chance, huh? I think I was trying to fill that silence with something else.
Again thanks for all of your comments.
Reading Joe’s comment is why I wrote this piece about American mythology.
We’re all part of some myth in progress. We’re a number, an interview, a thought, a photo, a reason, a connection point, and sometimes, part of a greater disconnect that we may not even be aware of.
I commented on Joe’s memoir:
As I read this on the West Coast I'm overwhelmed with emotion. I'm emotional anyways. I'm listening to a CD at work, headphones on, to Lost Ocean's "Just Glide". It's an unknown band just signed with EMI singing, "Come with me, it's time for us to move our feet."
There was no music to the horror that day. But music enhances emotion. And so I fight back tears as people walk past my office door.
It's haunting, reading such words, and connecting in some way. The West Coast is the great disconnect to 9/11. Manifest Destiny seems like it was easier to fulfill than to see sympathy in the eyes of a casual West Coast stranger about 9/11.
Disconnect.
Thank you for connecting me. You're the only person I've ever written to who was there that day.
The World Trade Center movie didn't even make me shed a tear. Your words are beyond such dilution.
Upon further reflection, there is a greater disconnect than just the West Coast that I talk about in Thick White Crust, a novel that is really a memoir about myself coming home the day the buildings fell; a book about the West falling out with the East.
That would be mythology. Kind of like the myth Fortuna felt while growing up near the Pentagon. She connected to a consciousness most of us here in Bakersfield would never understand. She writes:
Well, I can certainly understand some of Joe's matter-of-fact tone, although I was not injured and he was. Essentially we thought it was over. If you grow up in Washington DC, from the age you're old enough to understand what The Bomb or nuclear war is, you also know that we're target #1 or #2. Even as little kids we joked that a nuclear weapon would have no effect on us, because we'd be vaporized and the rest of the country would have to deal with it. So when 9/11 happened, I was pragmatic. The six-year-old inside of me said "This is the big one," and that was it. I expected to hear something, feel a shudder, and be gone. Weirdly it wasn't scary. I didn't cry, there wasn't a big emotional aftermath to deal with. If you're comfortable with death you just are... it's okay, and nothing can ever scare you fully. What made me sadder was the notion of lives lost, families bereaved... to this day I have never checked on the fate of a former student who worked in the World Trade Center, because I don't want to know. He probably didn't make it, but why confirm that? If I ever hear he's okay I'll be overjoyed, but otherwise I'd rather leave his fate uncertain. Strange, huh? So yeah, Joe's blog post made perfect sense, pragmatism and all. Thanks, Nick, for finding it and linking to it.
Historical interpretations can be a prism to the actual primary sources. Perspectives shine certain colors of light on events and people. Details get refracted into skewed beams that historians argue over in their constant checks and balances as what they think are the most accurate interpretations of primary sources.
But that’s not mythology. Mythology is born out of fantastical theories, including the purposeful acts by our own government to be a sort of big brother Parson Weems toward terrorist inflicted tragedies.
Is it propaganda, global regionalism, or maybe self-preservation in the eyes of the government to create a mythological effect reflecting American society?
In the case of 9/11, there is a disconnect. Myth progresses almost as if a flag were a person, and office workers melted into the shapes of angelic firemen, all lost somewhere above leaking staircases in an inferno that no one has yet imagined except the people caught there…
And yet, strip away all of the clothes, the insignias, breathing masks, office suits, the laughter, the screams; they were all people with emotions: hate, love, anger, passion, forgetfulness, thoughtlessness, thoughtfulness. Every single one lost that day.
9/11. Disconnect. Myth in progress. By N.L. Belardes
Under the guise of history, America connects. You see it all the time. In broad brush strokes on your television sets, thoughts are painted into your mind. Through repetition we remember. Headline news repeats the same coverage every half hour. Newsweek with photos oddly similar to Time Magazine images; and stories just as watered down. You see the dilution in flag waving and shades of details constituting the big sweeping events that help us to remember the consciousness of our shared country.
We’re connected through nation-making events no matter how watered down for mass consumption they’ve become; and through camera angles as obvious as tall sheriffs and low-lifes in old westerns.
Who directed the latest American epic?
You’ve seen the leaders swagger. One deified arm swung around a retired fire captain who happens to be standing on the most tragic pile of rubble on American soil since the Civil War. If only there had been cameras…
A bullhorn. Jeans. Red, white and blue above the grey dust and black smoke. Cattle rustlers on the high New York plains stamping a new breed. Forged brands release an acrid grey-white smoke off searing flesh.
Maybe the only true grey of 9/11 was the business suits on the front lines in and around twin towers of hell and death.
Or is that idea a myth in itself?
Yet, you associate with the myth. The myth of the great government response through cinematic images Port Authority Nicholas Cages, cloned and donning the sacred cloaks and breastplates of fire gear, and suits and ties...
Sure, someone in a red tie and bloodied white shirt threw off his grey suit, cursed the fuckers who ruined his day, then flung himself into what is going to become a sea of grey dust—not even an hour later.
But then, a lot of people lost their color. They became pairs of white eyes staring from a grey blanket covering a part of New York City.
Why are you accepting the myth?
Because the common man could be you. You imagine the arms around you. Thor’s hammer swings behind the government fist thrown into the sky, while the free arm is a hug you need because maybe you struggle with food stamps, a college loan, a mortgage, taxes, a government desk job... you want to be loved by the big cheese at the top. Don’t we all?
Or are you that hateful?
The historical detail gets muddied. What happened? American society spends more time on building myths rather than on recorded history. Yes, even in today’s era of recorded technological data through black boxes, and wireless programmable controllers, history is lost.
While mythmaking grows.
Mythology.
Mythmaking is not history. True history is data interpreted by an academic community, not fabricated and coated with patriotic colors by the media elite. Too harsh of a sentence? Can you tell the difference when it’s happening before your eyes? What you don’t realize, is that mythmaking disconnects in more ways that it connects.
You get in a car wreck. You’re head-injured. Your brain must re-wire before you can think straight. It self-heals, re-wires. Only now you think you’re a trapeze artist who has escaped the old Soviet Union.
Where did the self-healing go wrong?
You don’t even know. You’re sitting in a mental institution with a head injury. It’s the people around you who know you worked for a gas company, spending most days fighting off dogs in backyards. But you don’t care. You say you’re going to defect. You can teach a new generation how to train lions to hurl from swings 200 feet in the air.
You’re given brain meds 5 times a day.
There’s a problem in the schools because of mythmaking. Children enter college in disbelief, having lived their youth under the cloud of the American myth. Most don’t bother to unravel the cloud’s tentacles.
Most people think CNN and grade school history are the gospel. Including those who never go to college.
Recently my kid came home thinking North Korea was about to nuke the U.S.
No. “Are we even sure they detonated a nuclear weapon?”
“We talked about it in almost every class.”
“Right. And how many of your teachers are even half the news junky that I am? Show me evidence of a nuclear detonation. Just because the media and North Korea say there was a detonation, doesn’t mean it happened.” How many live under the cloud of myth? (Just today I read articles that doubted the power of the detonation)
“They tested a missile. A friend of mine said they could hit Alaska.”
“North Korea wants free food. Why would they want to bomb the country who could feed them? Do your teachers read more than CNN?”
George Washington, Daniel Boone, Christopher Columbus, Paul Bunyun, Abraham Lincoln, Chiang Kai Shek, Ghengis Khan, Ed Jagels, Arnold the Terminator. Kim Jong-il as Dr. Evil/Goldfinger…
These myths infect society to a core on every imaginable level.
Did George Washington cut down a cherry tree?
Parson Weems fully embracing filial piety said he did. He didn’t. Washington didn’t want to do half the corporate leadership projects he was appointed to. Can you imagine him in that mythical grey suit?
I was in an online argument with a popular author recently who wrote about Lincoln being a man of goodness and an emancipator.
“Show me where Lincoln ever said he wasn’t against slavery.” He wrote something of the sort.
Forget historians’ interpretations. I told him to google original source files regarding the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Lincoln admitted he wasn’t against slavery in the South or in Washington. He just didn’t want slavery expanded. At the moment, that would have thrown two distinct economic, social, and political systems into misalignment. That’s laissez-faire. He wanted to leave it alone.
If Lincoln could have won the Civil War without ending slavery, he would have.
And if Lincoln’s personal views were vehemently against all slavery, then he was flat out lying in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which were supposedly personal views, not just laying out demagogic political platforms.
Aren’t political views supposed to be personal views?
The author never answered back.
I like the author. He’s passionate.
But Lincoln’s no great emancipator except that he signed the check.
Buffalo Bill Cody isn’t my hero either.
Nor Winston Churchill or Stalin, or Lenin, or Marx (Sorry Sal) or McCarthy.
Recently I received a letter from Joe. He’s the author of a 9/11 memoir written five years after the event. He wrote a similar response on Paperback Writer:
I thought I'd stop by to say thanks to Nick for re-posting my story and all of you, his readers, for your comments. You never know where your words will end up when you drop them off in the big ether. Or, if your words will form a bridge of connection across miles or years. I don't walk around re-living the day but the process of writing put me right back there. I'm not nearly as matter of fact about it either, though after reading back through my post, I can see how I might have come across that way. Blame it on some level of self-protection still at work. I can say that it was much harder to edit than to write. Deciding which details to include or leave out at times felt like betrayal.
Why did I post that piece after all these years? Acknowledgement maybe or trying to reconnect myself. Maybe as Nick said, it might be for healing but truthfully I don't know. I do know I find something missing when I hear 9/11 discussed. For all the media noise there is an awful lot of silence about some things. The mythologizing began within the first few minutes and I'd like to see that kind of nonsense just go away. Fat chance, huh? I think I was trying to fill that silence with something else.
Again thanks for all of your comments.
Reading Joe’s comment is why I wrote this piece about American mythology.
We’re all part of some myth in progress. We’re a number, an interview, a thought, a photo, a reason, a connection point, and sometimes, part of a greater disconnect that we may not even be aware of.
I commented on Joe’s memoir:
As I read this on the West Coast I'm overwhelmed with emotion. I'm emotional anyways. I'm listening to a CD at work, headphones on, to Lost Ocean's "Just Glide". It's an unknown band just signed with EMI singing, "Come with me, it's time for us to move our feet."
There was no music to the horror that day. But music enhances emotion. And so I fight back tears as people walk past my office door.
It's haunting, reading such words, and connecting in some way. The West Coast is the great disconnect to 9/11. Manifest Destiny seems like it was easier to fulfill than to see sympathy in the eyes of a casual West Coast stranger about 9/11.
Disconnect.
Thank you for connecting me. You're the only person I've ever written to who was there that day.
The World Trade Center movie didn't even make me shed a tear. Your words are beyond such dilution.
Upon further reflection, there is a greater disconnect than just the West Coast that I talk about in Thick White Crust, a novel that is really a memoir about myself coming home the day the buildings fell; a book about the West falling out with the East.
That would be mythology. Kind of like the myth Fortuna felt while growing up near the Pentagon. She connected to a consciousness most of us here in Bakersfield would never understand. She writes:
Well, I can certainly understand some of Joe's matter-of-fact tone, although I was not injured and he was. Essentially we thought it was over. If you grow up in Washington DC, from the age you're old enough to understand what The Bomb or nuclear war is, you also know that we're target #1 or #2. Even as little kids we joked that a nuclear weapon would have no effect on us, because we'd be vaporized and the rest of the country would have to deal with it. So when 9/11 happened, I was pragmatic. The six-year-old inside of me said "This is the big one," and that was it. I expected to hear something, feel a shudder, and be gone. Weirdly it wasn't scary. I didn't cry, there wasn't a big emotional aftermath to deal with. If you're comfortable with death you just are... it's okay, and nothing can ever scare you fully. What made me sadder was the notion of lives lost, families bereaved... to this day I have never checked on the fate of a former student who worked in the World Trade Center, because I don't want to know. He probably didn't make it, but why confirm that? If I ever hear he's okay I'll be overjoyed, but otherwise I'd rather leave his fate uncertain. Strange, huh? So yeah, Joe's blog post made perfect sense, pragmatism and all. Thanks, Nick, for finding it and linking to it.
Historical interpretations can be a prism to the actual primary sources. Perspectives shine certain colors of light on events and people. Details get refracted into skewed beams that historians argue over in their constant checks and balances as what they think are the most accurate interpretations of primary sources.
But that’s not mythology. Mythology is born out of fantastical theories, including the purposeful acts by our own government to be a sort of big brother Parson Weems toward terrorist inflicted tragedies.
Is it propaganda, global regionalism, or maybe self-preservation in the eyes of the government to create a mythological effect reflecting American society?
In the case of 9/11, there is a disconnect. Myth progresses almost as if a flag were a person, and office workers melted into the shapes of angelic firemen, all lost somewhere above leaking staircases in an inferno that no one has yet imagined except the people caught there…
And yet, strip away all of the clothes, the insignias, breathing masks, office suits, the laughter, the screams; they were all people with emotions: hate, love, anger, passion, forgetfulness, thoughtlessness, thoughtfulness. Every single one lost that day.
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Wednesday, November 01, 2006.
You can leave your response.
wow!home run N.L.! Just when I'm ready to add fun and spicy to your food reviews I read this. Yes Mythology...we know there is a truth in life...we live truth but seem to mask it in a recapsulating myth. When we lose we reconnect the dots so as not to appear total failure or something. In tragedies we like the symbols, flags and eagles. The myth that above all America is a big mother of embracing love and pride. But the day to day, like here in B-town, is diverse groups not really bonding, graffiti-murder-graffiti-murder-blah,blah,blah and people succumb to the myth, that it's not a big problem cause it's not really in my hood, or politicians masking the reality by calling it an all-american city cause we opened another four star restaurant in the northwest!!Oh well, don't know what else to say, but great piece N.L.!
Beauty in truth that no one wants to see. Easier to live by and believe in the myth that is created to ease the lifestyle we're all accustomed to.
Lovely entry.
*R
Wow! Truely amazing... we are all living in shadows of myth and we're complacent to do so...
Your novel Thick White Crust is a favorite of mine. I love the myths, legends and questions that you explore in it. And I love the mythical style in which it is written.
Thank you for writing this piece and for Joe's story on 9/11.
I can't believe you wrote this TWO WEEKS ago and then just sat on it and didn't share until today. :) I love it. Great article!
did you really write this?! just kidding... i know you did... you're extremely talented like that.
so great! so true... myths are sometimes easier to live in than truly seeing the truth and dealing with the realities of life.
joe's story is very moving. it gives me butterflies. reality check...
thank you.
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