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10-11-01
Signs in the Rubble
By Shari Cohen
“We are sorry
for what happened.” “We are
thinking of the rescue workers.” So read
letters from school children from Osceola, Florida that had been hung on a bus stop
shelter on Chambers Street between Greenwich and West streets, where the checkpoints to
stem the flow of traffic to “Ground Zero” are set up. The entire back of the shelter was occupied by the
letters and by a large painting of a brown sky filled with smoke over the two fallen
towers that the kids had drawn based on what they saw on TV. The advertisement for Rockport shoes, on one side
panel of the shelter, is dwarfed now by the handmade and individual human contributions
that decorate the rest of the structure.
Other signs of this remarkable moment include:
The disaster site itself, the former center of commerce, might become a park or a memorial to victims. The rescue effort on that site is one of the most significant voluntary efforts ever.
At the Metropolitan Opera House, a large American flag now hangs between the Chagalls. Ads from corporate sponsors have never achieved such a position.
The city stepped in to prevent the hawking of WTC dust, providing families of victims with urns.
The mayor told people to remember to shop.
A sign on the front window of Kenneth Cole, the fashionable shoe store, reads: “What we stand for is more important than what we stand in.”
The Barnes and Noble at 66th and Broadway has posted a sign about the firemen from the local station, one block over on Amsterdam Avenue, who were lost in the rescue effort.
Huge media conglomerates took great losses by providing coverage of the first weeks of news without advertising.
Investing in stocks is an act of patriotism. (A leftist-oriented friend saw her purchase of Nikes after the attack as a sort of act of resistance.)
The city has
changed. Everyone has remarked on it. But what kind of change is this? The planes ripping through the World Trade Center
have momentarily torn away the boundaries between the people of the city: greed has turned
to altruism. Cynicism has, for the moment,
been replaced by earnestness as the need for connection to something larger became acute
and widely shared. And the terribly real
experience of September 11 seems to have eclipsed the preoccupation with image.
On the bus shelter,
at the disaster site and around town, the very physical space that had been occupied by
commerce in this city of commerce, this center of globalization, seems increasingly to be
occupied by civic activism through volunteering, patriotism and neighborly concern.
Has the ever increasing role of
business in our lives – that critical trend in which everything from relationships to
religion were commodified -- been pushed off course?
Is this a new efflorescence of that elusive civic engagement that academics,
politicians and activists have been trying to build for the last decade? Is this an acceleration of existing trends in
which the market has been increasingly mixing profit with human concerns and might
companies find a way to invest in human, local and socially responsible endeavors even as
they need to cut back? Is the
“civic” itself a marketing scam, perpetuating a nostalgia for an Americanism of
a more innocent period?
The signs are
ambiguous. There is no way to know what kind
of new era we are entering, and if it is new at all.
At best we can try to read the signs of the changed city and ask questions
that might help us understand both the possibilities – and the dangers – in this
moment.
Cynicism and
earnestness
I am not the first
to remark on the new earnestness that seems to be emerging.
The pervasive cynicism of recent years, which by definition put people at a
distance from one another and from common ideals, seems to have waned. Even Madison Avenue is recognizing a decline of
cynicism as evidenced in the following e-mail from a marketing firm passed on to me by a
friend:
If there are more terrorist attacks, military action with loss of life and further erosion of the U.S. economy, the psyche of the young consumer could change. Young people might become more introspective; they may question their values and adjust their priorities. Many of the marketing/advertising appeals of recent years (e.g., cool, status, irony, cynicism, shock value) may sound hollow to young people seeking security, community, guidance and value.
The relief and rapidity with which
the flag was embraced, even by people who are generally ambivalent about this symbol
("I am from the generation that burned flags but today I embrace it fully and with no
question," said one cousin), is suggestive of impulses and desires for unqualified
and common connection to something larger – and something not for sale. Or does it matter if it is for sale? Marketing firms in recent years would have loved
an idea as "viral" as the flag.
Is it necessarily true that
marketing "security" and "guidance" dehumanize and hollow out such
values? Or is this a moment for the market to
be redirected to human ends? How resilient
and lasting will this new earnestness be?
Obviously, with the
flag waving – marketed or not -- often comes jingoism: stronger collective
identification usually means a boundary against the “other.” Right now, the "other" is anyone who
appears to be of Middle Eastern origin. (Interestingly,
this has momentarily superseded the divide based on class and the black-white divide.) The challenge is whether we can bind ourselves
together without creating an "other," a challenge that looks increasingly tricky
at a moment when Americans are ready to accept racial profiling and other restraints on
civil liberties. The elusiveness of
terrorism as an enemy, however, and the difficulty of identifying the real threat present
an intriguing possibility for a "we" based on common values, not on opposition
to an “other.” But what common values are these?
Surely there is a shift toward valuing the ideals, not just the free
markets, of western civilization. But what
would a world organized around civilizations really look like? Do all those flags really mean the resurgence of
the nation-state or loyalty to something else? And
surely, the "we" that is currently being forged is still subject to trends
toward higher levels of individualism than ever before.
Greed and altruism
If a shift away
from cynicism allows for greater connection to common norms, a move from greed to altruism
breaks down the boundaries between neighbors and people of different classes, enabling new
possibilities for common action. My parents'
upscale apartment building that rises above the firehouse at 66th and Amsterdam
decided to make its exclusive health club available for the use of the firemen from the
station, which lost 11 of its men in the rescue effort. The firehouse had, previously,
entered residents' consciousness mostly because the sirens could diminish property values. Strangers in the health club would have been
considered an annoyance at best; last week my mother reported that she and other residents
felt privileged to talk to the firemen who took advantage of the offer to enter the
doorman building which, while one door down, had been worlds away.
The fancy
restaurants downtown – Danube, Bouley Bakery and others – hand out food to
rescue workers even as they worry about whether they will remain in business in the months
ahead. A new public radio ad for Danube says
that the restaurant, which had been feeding rescue workers, is now open for business. Cabbies seem not to want tips.
How long will the
new awarenesses – of common vulnerability and humanity and of the limits of the gated
and isolated lives the city breeds – last? What
will sustain them? The jostling for subway
space, that breeds dozens of small conflicts each day in New York, was markedly subdued in
the first weeks after September 11th . But
it is slowly returning. Might these other
shifts toward greater altruism be ephemeral as well?
Or will the new awareness result in new policies like the one in my parents'
building? Will they result in new
coalitions? Will the new altruism extend
beyond people involved in the World Trade Center disaster (to the homeless, for example)?
Image and real
experience
One reason to think it might be
possible to sustain some of the new altruism is the fact that image – both our highly
mediated lives and our preoccupation with consumption as a way of building our own image
-- seems to have been replaced by real experience, stretching people into new areas of
understanding. There is no escaping the
real, physical nature of this event: The city divided at Chambers Street with subways
silently sailing past the stops downtown. The
smoldering piles of rubble. The pieces of
bodies. The ubiquitous posters of the
missing. The shrines to the victims in Union
Square and in firehouses around town.
In light of this, I have been
wondering what will become of what social theorists have begun to call the
"experience economy" with its emphasis on providing simulations of real life for
sale. This trend – from buying antiques
to adventure travel – showed a desire not just for authenticity, but for a depth and
intensity of feeling. There is a terrible
irony in the fact that the generation that engaged in body-piercing and extreme sports as
a way of feeling something in an increasingly MacDonaldized world have now had – and
might continue to face -- real life and death experiences.
Will this real-life
experience of other worlds – the world of radical Islam, the world of violence and
loss – enlarge us by breaking down our boundaries, or will we recoil into
survivalism? What is the difference, in this
regard, between the people of New York, and those in the rest of the country?
This moment of earnestness, altruism and reality of experience might well fade as we attempt to rekindle people’s desire to consume and to return New York to its place as the engine of global commerce. But this moment – by having offered us a glimpse of a different sort of relationship to others, and a new ordering of priorities in this city of consumption -- could also function to enlarge our capacity to imagine new ways of constructing the balance among profit, consumption, human relationship and a better society. And this might even be accomplished through the market, albeit by a market with reordered priorities.
We are very quick to want to return to life before September 11, even though we know that the future is very much up for grabs. But we need to avoid trying to cover over the rupture with past assumptions and approaches. We need to have the courage to live with the uncertainty as we read the meaning of the signs of renewal that have appeared from out of the rubble of this disaster.
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