The Lost Quality of Shame

"Loyalty to petrified opinion ain't never yet broke a chain nor freed a human soul." Mark Twain

This evening in trying to avoid anything on tv that would even hint at the tragedy of 911 I stumbled upon a documentary all about 911. I saw the smoke spewing from the upper floors, the people jumping and the faces of those below watching. I was transfixed. Just as I was transfixed 5 years ago today, watching my tv numb with shock, unable to cry, only stare at the tv as if this were just tv, a show, something not real. But of course it was real.

I lived in New York City for 10 years, from 1986 to 1996. It was a time of high crime, homelessness that had to be seen to be believed and a wild unpredictability about what might happen next that was legendary. 42nd Street from 7th to 9th Avenue was filthy, strewn with litter, petty thieves, prostitutes and tourists all ambling about amidst porn shops, lap dancing palaces, hot dog stands, closed up theaters and movie houses either showing porn or martial arts films. I loved New York, I loved the pace and crazy excitement, I loved the pulse that throbbed in the very streets of Manhattan. And for me, during that time, the towers were always there. They were a kind of lighthouse, a reference point to guide yourself home by late at night, or early in the morning. Always there, always visible. If you never saw them outside a few postcards or pictures or on tv then you never really understood their magnitude, the simple awesomeness of their size.

I am thinking and writing about this for a couple of reasons. One is an article I read about some idiots out in the country, well educated men but idiots nonetheless, who claim that there never were planes that crashed into the Towers, that the Towers were detonated by the government and that the people watching in shock and horror were simply actors. "Come on," said one idiot, "That's New York, you can find hundreds of actors willing to act shocked about anything for the right money." Ok. Fine. We'll ignore the filmed footage of the planes, both of them, crumpling into the buildings with such loud thuds and crashes; we'll ignore the flames coming out at the very point of impact; and we'll ignore the fact that, if it were a demolition by the government, the top floors are an odd place to detonate the explosion, theoretically. But you see there is still the footage of the people down below. Their faces, the looks, the drained, shocked to the core looks that their faces carry; the hundred yard stares, unseeing but seeing eyes, the complete horror. You see that cannot be faked and there aren't enough actors of that high a caliber to make such news footage look so real.

When I look at the pictures of the faces I am reminded of photos I saw about 10 years ago in a book about the newly opened KGB files. The book was called Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime by Vitaly Shentalinsky. The photos were before and after shots of most of Russia's elite artistic community - Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Boris Pilnyak and others. Before they were tortured and after. To look at these photos, some taken merely months apart, is to see how torture can rob a person of their soul, because in the after photos these men have the look of the living dead. The look is the same look I saw on the faces of the people watching the towers fall. Blank, disbelieving, shocked beyond any possible hope of feeling.

This brings me to my second reason for even venturing near this subject today: torture. Last night I listened to the Vice President of the United States defend the practice of torture as if it were truly some effective tool. He claimed that reliable information had been acquired through such methods. Isaac Babel once asked Stalin's first executioner, Yezhov, what one should do if tortured. "Confess to everything," said Yezhov, "because it doesn't really matter if you did it or not." The look on Babel's face, the last picture taken of him before he was shot, says it all. The emptiness is so loud it is deafening. They all confessed, gave names, cried for their mothers, pissed and shat themselves and died a death like Kafka's K., no better than a dog. I could not help but think: is this what we have come to as a nation? Are we no better than this? If you believe that the ends justifies the means than you have your answer to these questions. But I am not seeing chains being broken nor human souls being freed; I am seeing the shackling of an entire nation to the burden of dispicable acts.


The two events are linked, the towers and the torture, because the people in power use the one as a constant, cudgel like reminder of why we need the second. I have heard that their hearts are sincere, that they truly believe in their "crusade", but I cannot help but feel that their sincerity is no more than the tears of the crocodile and their hunger is just as vile. Look at what we have become.