While i sympathize with Evan's rejection of the fetishization of September 11th and his call to move on to September 12, i do feel traumatized by what happened. I feel traumatized when i see the video images of huge clouds of toxic debris sweeping up into the sky and uptown, enshrouding church street and sixth avenue and varick and west broadway and probably my old guitar teacher Jerry's ex girlfriend's loft on franklin in a pompeii-like shroud of death. The photographs of people jumping to their deaths make me think of the triangle shirtwaist fire and they make me think of my brother's friends' parents and my parents' friends who didn't make it out. And i think about the 43 members of local 100 and all the people standing on the street with photographs of the dead. And then i think about that early footage of Giuliani, eschewing grief for a cry for war, his enemy, the "barbarians," already clearly demarcated. I think about how quickly he was to urge new yorkers to channel trauma and grief into hatred and vengeance. We rightly accused bush and the RNC of hijacking our collective trauma when they brought their convention, with its seemingly infinite detentions and frenzied police state of a city, to a new york still bearing the scars, as axl would say, of their civil wars. But upon seeing all that early press conference footage of Giuliani, seeing his speeches in the days just after, it occurs to me once again that the the real hijacking here began much, much earlier.



And of course September 11 makes me think of 1973 as well as 2001, of los desaparecidos and henry kissenger, of salvador allende and milton friedman. of roosting chickens and the international monetary fund and donald duck,ariel dorfman, and victor jara, soccer stadiums and torture chambers and the university of chicago.



Three years ago, i was in new haven, writing a reading response for michael denning and patricia pessar's ERM Intro seminar. I was walking through durfee's sweet shop when i saw the images on the television screen. The rest of the day was surreal. On september 14, i hopped on a metro north to go visit my parents for a few hours, make sure they were still there, etc. The city felt quiet. It felt dead. It still does.