Of terror, guilt, consumer electronics, etc.
9月12日 (土\日) 12:19am JST
Friday mornings are always pretty slack, since in the morning, I only have guidance with the international students. Friday afternoon though, I had my first English club. It didn’t go particularly productively, and then since I didn’t know what was going on, I accidentally left too early. On top of that, I forgot about the language lab keys in my pocket and my umbrella in the stand. These kinds of small setbacks always make me feel like the worst employee in the world. I was worried that they needed the key, so I went over to school this morning to return it. This made the impression that I’m too diligent a worker to leave it undone, when really I’m just to guilt ridden about other things, ie. leaving early after getting little done.
After returning the keys, I came home and played some Wind Waker. A few days ago, I started replaying a game I started earlier this summer. Now, I’m trying to see how much cool stuff I can do without advancing the story line to the end. While I was playing, T--- buzzed to say that I had a letter in my box from Yahoo! BB. I got it put into simpler Japanese by a woman Yamada Denki. It seems like I’m there every Saturday. It’s just not the weekend without oogling electronics. She said I should have service starting Tuesday. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, on the bike ride over, I realized that it’s September 11. I had a perverse urge to call out in a George Bailey voice, “Hey, everybody! It’s September 11! Hey, frowny, strangely dressed Japanese woman! Don’t be sad; it’s September 11! Hey, Japanese kids! Don’t pester your mom; it’s September 11! Hey, Japanese grannies! Don’t walk with a hunch; it’s September 11!”
Then, I imagined a South Park episode in which the boys learn the true meaning of September 11. “It’s not about Iraq or Saddam or WMD. It’s not about Bin Laden or Al Qaeda or Afghanistan. It’s not about burning bodies jumping from the windows of hundred story buildings or passengers wrestling a plane into a crash landing in an empty field. It’s not about Bush or Kerry, Saudi Arabia or Michael Moore, Colin Powell or Donald Rumsfeld. It’s not about the shopping or the presents. It’s not about Santa or his reindeer. It’s about a little baby born 2,000 years ago in a manger. That’s the real meaning of September 11!”
Such thoughts are, of course, beyond blasphemous.
Later tonight, I saw a special in which Goro of SMAP plays an investment banker killed on September 11. I’ll be damned if, bad English acting or no, my eyes didn’t water up during the shots of the towers being hit and falling. Even put into a work of fiction (and not even an especially good one at that), those images retain their intense emotional power. The power is so overwhelming that projects like “The True Meaning of September 11″ are doomed for now.
Earlier on Japanese TV, Beat Takeshi, one time comedian turned director and the star of “Most Extreme Elimination,” “Battle Royale,” etc., had a show about the “unanswered questions of September 11.” In other words, conspiracy theories. In a way, of course, I am unqualified to say anything about September 11 beyond what I know personally:
I went to New York before, and there were towers.
I’ve been since and there aren’t.
My cousin tells me she saw it from the park.
That’s it. Everything else I “know” I learned from TV, newspapers, the internet. In other words, I “know” about it the same way that Arabs know it was all an Israeli plot— I heard it somewhere, and it sounded true to me.
Philosophy is criticized for being too aloof and remote from life, but the problems it grapples with are relevant to living. Descartes’ problem remains— how do I know what I know? What can I trust? He said we can definitely trust a priori logic, then used that logic to prove we could trust everything else. Evolutionarily, people are born hard wired to recognize other humans and suppose that the same sort of thing is happening in the noddles of others as in one’s own noodle. Thus, riding my bike home, I trusted all the cars on the road not to suddenly kamikaze attack me, driving into me and killing me, because I can’t imagine myself doing that in their shoes. But on September 11, that logic hideously collapsed. New Yorkers may not have hated Mohammed Atta, but Mohammed Atta hated New Yorkers. Social trust was shattered on a number of levels. Expectations about not hijacking planes then how hijacking is conducted then the kinds of targets available to hostile forces all fell, one after the other. Which makes it odd that I should trust, in the normal sorts of ways, what I’ve heard about September 11, when evaluating the plausibility of conspiracy theories. September 11 was about the failure of ordinary thinking to prevent the extra-ordinary. After the fact, it’s easy to go back and say, “No, ordinary thinking would have understood and prevented September 11, we just needed to know more about the mindsets of the terrorists, then we could have thought through their processes, predicted their goal, and stopped it.” Something that didn’t make sense happened, but then we decided after the fact that it did make sense, we just didn’t know enough. But how do we know that we now know enough to keep non-sensical things from continuing to take place? Everything is first assumed to make sense, then we go back and fill in the reasoning. But if things don’t make sense, then there’s nothing we can do. If things don’t make sense, there’s nothing you can learn that can protect you. Everything is subject to violent failure.
So, to doubt the conventional wisdom is like doubting the pyramids or the moon landing or many other things that I’ve heard about and believe in but have never seen. Given voice, such doubts would paralyze. I have to believe that things will continue to happen in the way I expect them to happen, since to believe otherwise means preemptive death. If I don’t go about my life, then I’m letting the terrorists win. I accept common knowledge, and merely pray that the world doesn’t collapse.
That’s the real meaning of September 11!
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