I was attending an open house at my daughter's high school the day
after the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon when her world history teacher confessed
that all he could do the
previous day was to watch TV accounts of the events along with his students.
This intelligent man
who had taught world affairs for 20 years said he was "speechless"
in the face of these terrible
attacks.
I had likewise dismissed my midmorning class that day, feeling
the hopelessness of saying anything
meaningful, or keeping my composure, for that matter.
I think my reaction and that of others I talked with early that
day were similar. We were dumbfounded -
struck dumb. We couldn't find words to surround the situation.
The image of a sleek commercial jet poised in a sun-filled sky
a split second before plowing into the
gleaming grid of a skyscraper was something that simply could not be. "I
don't believe what I'm
seeing" was too common a phrase to even begin to represent the unreality
of the situation. It was as
if the massive gears of reality should have ground to a halt at that moment.
But incomprehensibly
they didn't.
"Unreal," "unbelievable," "beyond comprehension,"
were all things you may have heard people say
as they shook their heads. Someone on the radio said that people "can't
accept" what they're
seeing. Disbelief was the gut reaction to this - what? - that had happened.
Understanding what had
happened was one of the early casualties.
As the TV stations played and replayed the impacts and subsequent
collapses and as the video came in of
the attack on the Pentagon and the crater where another plane had crashed
to the ground in western
Pennsylvania, we finally became convinced that it did happen, but that
feeling of pure surprise, shock,
confusion, and revulsion - those things we casually call "horror"
- continued to linger.
By now, for most people, the initial shock has begun to wear
off and the process of cushioning the event in
words is well under way. In fact with our TVs, radios, computers, and other
devices constantly
tuned in at work and at home, with the special editions of newspapers,
magazines, and other
publications overwhelming the racks, we are threatened with becoming numb
to it all.
But I think it might be useful to recall for a minute or two
that painful time when we first heard of or
saw these events and probe the wound before it scars over.
I'd like to argue that for that time, for the minutes and hours
these horrible events were taking place,
many of us were dumbfounded because there was no sensible story pattern
we could conveniently
drop the events into.
Yes, Pearl Harbor was trucked out, but the known enemy and conventional
warfare of the World War
II era didn't really fit. Crises such as the Kennedy assassination and
the Challenger disaster - big,
nationally televised disasters of previous years - had a vaguely familiar
feel when they happened
since they fit older story patterns of the Lincoln assassination and the
Apollo disaster, but there was
little help from these stories now. Even Oklahoma City was rarely invoked,
perhaps because of its
more conventional bombing and domestic perpetrators.
 But this. This was unprecedented
in the modern collective storehouse of tales of our nation.
Commentators reached back as far as Antietam to try to find a case when
human carnage on U.S.
soil might be as high. And horrible though they were, collective memories
of Civil War battles, such as
they are, have little resonance for these terrible new circumstances involving
commuter jets,
skyscrapers, and religious zealots.
Disaster movie plots and Tom Clancy novels were mentioned in
embarrassed asides, but there were
no Bruce Willises or plausible plot lines here.
The fact that there were no stories to contain these events is
not trivial. Stories - even horrible and
scary ones - soothe in their own way. Mark Twain's comment that "fiction
is obliged to stick to
possibilities; truth isn't," is relevant here. Stories, fictional
or not, make sense of things.
Stories bring raw events into the realm of the possible where
things are more predictable and
comfortable - rather than leaving us with the crude, scary truth that is
often neither.
Whoever controls the stories - what we often call "spin"
- is going to have a great influence on what
ultimately transpires: war or diplomacy; our continued free and open democratic
society, or a more
closed closely controlled one.
Since there are no real story precedents, what we are beginning
to see are attempts to fit existing
story patterns to the events. With the major TV networks, CNN, and Fox
running 24 hours a day in the
initial coverage of this crisis, all struggling to make sense of it, there
was a constant attempt by all
comers to tell their stories and fill this void; to sell their stories
as the most convincing ones that would
sum up this situation.
As various groups and individuals stepped before the cameras,
they told personal stories of
everything from pure insane luck - dodging flames, falling debris, and
gaping holes in the upper floors
of a collapsing building and emerging unscathed - to personal calculated
heroism: overpowering
would-be terrorists and crashing a plane to prevent wider bloodshed, from
grief-filled tales of those
frantically searching for loved ones on the streets of Manhattan, to joyous
stories of tearful reunions.
Even apparent urban legends of a survivor surfing down a collapsing
tower or claims of visions of
Satan's face in the billowing smoke may be seen as more fantastic stories
people told to "make sense
of these disasters," as one investigator explained.
On a larger level people told stories ranging from the need to
retaliate in a massive military fashion to
the need to seek cooperative justice in world courts or, as the University
of Toledo's president Dr. Daniel
Johnson told those gathered at a memorial on UT's campus, "that we
are all in the same boat."
That at such a time "world peace, understanding, and tolerance"
are what we are most in need of
reaffirming. Aristotle writes that people would rather believe a convincing
impossibility than an
unconvincing possibility; to paraphrase: People would rather believe the
convincing impossibility that
the U.S. could crush thousands of microscopic cells of terrorism throughout
the world with a massive
invading force. They would find it harder to believe the more unconvincing
but real possibility that this
will be a long process that will involve sophisticated diplomacy and reaffirmations
of the principles of
diversity in our society.
If the successful stories are those that lead us down the long
road of ever-widening circles of
retribution and counter-retribution - as we can see in the current Middle
East crisis - I don't think they'll
ultimately serve us or our children well. If the stories instead lead to
more measured sanctions from
military to economic to diplomatic, I believe they will be ultimately more
successful. Maybe not in a
satisfying movie-like crisis climax, resolution manner, but in a way that
will be most useful for the
stories our children will tell. And will be alive to tell.
Paul Many is a professor in the Department of Communication and
also teaches in the
Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo.
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