by Mark Morelli
On one side of my property is a thickly wooded lot. This affords me much backyard privacy. I don’t even know who lives on the other side of the woods. I sat at the dining room table reading the newspaper; I heard a strange voice just five feet away from the window, addressing my children in the back yard. The man spoke English with a Middle Eastern accent.
I realize this sounds like a metaphor to describe the September 11 attack on America. But this is all true.
I stepped outside to see who was there.
He stood at my gate respectfully, this small man who unsurprisingly looked like he sounded -- dark skin, dark moustache. His three-year-old daughter had wandered through the woods to my back yard where she now played with my own daughters.
He remained respectfully at the gate. I opened it and welcomed him into the yard. We introduced ourselves. I met Milik.
This was September 14.
He told me he le ft his native Jordan for America six years before.
“I love it here,” he said. He added quickly, “In Jordan, it is too much Moslem.” He added emphatically, “I am a Christian.”
One week before I’d have thought nothing of his, what shall I call it, disclaimer. I would’ve figured he was just a proud immigrant, awash in all that is wonderful and free about America. Would he have gone to such lengths to renounce his homeland a week before?
“Let your daughter play,” I said. We watched the three little girls play.
I, and the rest of America, mused: “Things will never be the same” a movie dialogue if I ever heard one.
After September 11, we prepared ourselves for follow up attacks and they came -- in the form of marketing-style names for the event.
“The first war of the 21st Century.”
“America Attacked.“
“America’s New War.”
"America Recovers."
I waited to hear Brokaw say, “Our coverage of ‘America: Really Ticked Off Now & Ready to Rrrrrrumble’ continues with this report....”
George Will wrote that “just at the moment when American political debate had reached a nadir of frivolousness, with wrangling about nonexistent ‘lock boxes’ and the like, the nation's decade-long holiday from history came to a shattering end.”
We heard everywhere that America “lost its innocence.” Had the World Trade Center attack occurred one week e arlier, Anne Heche’s book would already be in the remainder bin. It wasn’t “innocence” we lost.
September 11 marks the end of frivolity.
For twenty years, David Letterman was hip, flip and got absolutely quirky when any subject on his talk show got too "heavy." Early last year, he underwent a quintuple bypass surgery and reemerged mortal. At 52, he was suddenly reflective and mature, his frivolousness instantly dissipated like Dorian Gray.
When America itself faced its first sobering shock of mortality in generations, Letterman led the charge to the New Reverence. His first guest, CBS news anchor Dan Rather, who had been living round the clock with this news story for more than a week, recited “America the Beautiful” and was so overcome with grief and pride that he wept.
Conditioned by Dave himself in the Age of Irony, I instinctively expected see Letterman crack into his Alfred E. Neuman, dumb guy grin, his brow raised for the camera. Of course I knew he wouldn't. Instead, Letterman took his guest’s hand and comforted him. Letterman lauded New York mayor Rudolf Giuliani over and over and over. (Rather said that in one appearance, President Bush appeared "Guiliani-esque,” an odd case of a U.S. president being praised for acting like a good mayor.)
We’ve been too unctuous and x-rated to call ourselves innocent. We were stimulated to the point of dullness and so self-indulgent that our analysis of reality TV became navel gazing about navel gazing.
In the stomach-turning hand wringing about “when we will all learn to laugh again” that occurred after the attacks, our culture revealed its immaturity. We mistook seriousness for humorlessness. That is because for so long, our humor was not based on intelligence, but flip cheesiness, sitcom leers and late night TV jokes that more resembled lobs from the back row of study hall.
I fear that an excess focus on one national mood infantilizes us and will reveal a national temperament that gets bored quickly and is inattentive to anything beneath the surface. Been there, done that?
We should stop thinking that in our hearts we must be all or nothing at all -- all serious or all frivolous -- and balance our temperament with both jollity and somberness. I would be happy to live in a culture that -- within a day of the atrocities -- could openly tell the joke that I was thinking: These terrorist bastards hit those buildings only as a preemptive strike for the real attack...the carpet bombing of American ears with the caterwauling of Lee Greenwood.
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