My poetry professor looked me in the eye and said something that has resonated with me for years.
“Now is when we need poetry the most.”
It sounded like self-important hyperbole, but I rolled my eyes and went to class.
In the days, weeks, months and years after 9/11, I came to understand exactly what she meant.
In the first few years after the attacks, dissent and differing opinions were muted in a chilling way.
I was at the Pearl Jam show in Denver in 2003 when Eddie Vedder placed a George W. Bush mask on his mic stand and smashed it to the stage. The fighting in Iraq began less than two weeks earlier and Vedder’s demonstration turned into national news. People questioned whether he had a right to do such a thing, to make such a statement.
That was weeks after the Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks said she was ashamed to be from the same state as Bush. The trio was called unpatriotic and received death threats.
In 2002, Steve Earle issued “John Walker’s Blues,” which attempted to understand the motivations of John Walker Lindh, the American-born Taliban fighter who spent his teenage years in the Bay Area. Earle came under fire for sympathizing with terrorists, but he said he was trying to empathize with a boy near the age of one of his own.
With a president saying, “Either you’re with us or you are with the terrorists,” I found a strange comfort in Earle’s song, knowing there were other Americans who didn’t wholly and completely subscribe to Toby Keith’s “We’ll put a boot in your a-- / It’s the American way” way of looking at things.
That it was a question whether they had a right to say these things astonished me, but it also reinforced what my professor meant.
No incident said it better, however, than the cancellation of Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” show on ABC. In the weeks after the attacks, he rejected the notion that the hijackers were cowards. “Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it — not cowardly,” he said.
It didn’t cost him his show, but it cost him advertising support, which eventually led ABC to ax his program.
His remarks even prompted the White House press secretary to say “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do.”
In the decade since 9/11, however, artists such as Earle, Maines and Vedder made room for opinions that might not be as popular, but have just as much of a right to exist.
In 2006, we saw the release of “United 93″ and “World Trade Center,” two films that took their stories from that morning’s events, suggesting we had moved to a new place in the pop culture discourse.
In that same year, the Dixie Chicks issued “Not Ready to Make Nice” (left), which touched on the controversy — “They’d write me a letter / Saying that I better shut up and sing / Or my life will be over.” It became their highest-charting single to date.
In 2009, James Cameron released “Avatar,” which went on to be the highest-grossing movie ever made. It also served as Cameron’s thinly veiled parable about the Iraq War.
“Our only security lies in pre-emptive attack,” the film’s Col. Miles Quatrich (Stephen Lang) tells his troops before battle. “We will fight terror with terror.”
Earlier this week, FX’s “Rescue Me” aired its final episode. The dramedy depicted the lives of New York City firefighters post-9/11 and the emotional and psychological ripples throughout their lives. In the fifth season, one of the firefighters announced to a journalist he believed 9/11 “was an inside job,” an allusion to the 9/11 truth movement, much to the disgust of his colleagues.
That story line says just how far we’ve come.
During the last decade, as time heals our wounds, we increasingly accepted a level of discussion about that day and the events that followed it.
Discussion and disagreement are so valuable that those who made this nation thought it should be first among all our constitutional rights.
Our artistic community should never lose that freedom, no matter what.
Because when we are at our most hurt and vulnerable, that is the time when we need poetry the most.
Well written - that was poetry!
Posted by: Julie | September 11, 2011 at 08:58 AM
Ah, Zimm. She taught me about how to use hyperbole as something other than a weapon.
Posted by: Sean D. | September 13, 2011 at 01:44 PM