Great Times in Commotion

9/11 Flipbook, scott_bl8ke, 2011

When I was in Primary 7 we had to spend Wednesday afternoon doing drama. At one point this neatly crossed over with our study of the Second World War - in groups of three we had pretend it was 1939 and we had just heard Neville Chamberlain's declaration of war against Germany. I simply couldn't act as if I was shocked by the start of the war. It meant nothing to me and there was nothing in my own living memory at the age of 11 that came anywhere near that event that I could draw upon. To me, the war was documentaries looking back half a century and old Sunday afternoon films about heroic adventures (it hadn't yet been fully abused and commercialised by first person shooters) which was not the context the people of the real 1939 were living in. That drama class is over half my lifetime ago, so I can't remember what response I acted if any.

It's been said the 20th century didn't begin until the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and that it ended in 1989 with the felling of the Berlin War. A century, outside the literal dates that form it, is viewed as a narrative stretching through decades. In the case of the twentieth that story is the sequence of events beginning with the outbreak of the First World War through the decline of the great powers, the rise of the superpowers, and eventually the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Of course, the First World War didn't emerge from the aether, it was the outcome of the post-Napoleonic world (and so on back in time); but the events that preceded it are like the minutes before the stroke of midnight. Similarly, the demise of the Soviet Union was not the end of history, just the end of the day in this analogy.

September 11th 2001 was the first day of the 21st century, and that's genuinely how I understood that live footage ten years ago. I can remember when the IRA were conducting a bombing campaign on the British mainland - it didn't affect me, but I was aware of terrorism. But how do you know what you're seeing will define history? It's a bit like pornography - you'll know it when you see it. Flying laden passenger jets into the financial and political architecture of America was so obviously well beyond the level of car bombs on the high street in terms of audacity and fatalities that it couldn't possibly fail to influence the course of world history. Sometimes it's hard to believe it actually happened, especially when your experience of the events was via television; in which case re-watching the footage only compounds the dissociation from reality.

If you want an image of the future, imagine kids learning about September 11th in school. There's nothing more culturally divisive than interacting with a sub-population that cannot, by situation of age, relate to the linchpin event that defines the current narrative. It's making a hypocrite out of me. Isn't that what ageing is all about?

For a more youthful and iconoclastic take on this, compare my post from five years ago.

Written July and August 2011
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