Toward lower-key 9/11 remembrance

Now that the "ten-year anniversary" of 9/11 is past, maybe we can stop highlighting the event.

Surely we saw this coming: the 10-year milestone that would surely cause media outlets to trot out all that horrifying footage. It happened just the way we could have scripted it.

I for one don't see the necessity.

I have a media background and I know how this particular beast works. The tragic-beyond-words episode of 9/11 has "visuals." The media prize those.
Once the first plane struck the World Trade Center, it was guaranteed that countless cameras were going to be pointed at the complex.

This was in Manhattan where the media are concentrated. To begin with, any event there is going to get more attention than a comparable event out here in the hinterlands.

Mike Barnicle said on MSNBC the other morning that part of Notre Dame's problem staying competitive in football is that South Bend, Indiana, is "in the middle of nowhere." I've never been to South Bend but I'm quite sure it isn't in the middle of nowhere.
What does that make us?

Barnicle with his thick eastern accent can be forgiven. He's a caring soul who just happens to be New York City-centric.

As 9/11 unfolded on that morning out of hell, it was guaranteed to be in a fishbowl. With such riveting video footage stored away, it was certain we'd see it all again when that magical 10-year milestone arrived.

Magical? I have written on this site before that anniversary stories in the media have never impressed me. Why should the accident of an anniversary cause a particular event to be trotted out before us again?

Part of the explanation is the intense competition caused by the 24-hour news cycle. When I was a kid the "news" was neatly compartmentalized. The "evening news" was when people got home from work. The news they really had to know about was neatly organized into a half-hour program on network TV.

Professionals with a sense of scale and basic decency organized it. They had a sense of mission beyond ratings. Really they did, because how else could you justify Irving R. Levine doing a dry-as-dust business segment on many nights?
Remember, this was in a previous time when "business news" was synonymous with boring, when most people couldn't be made to pay attention to what the Federal Reserve did.

Political activity was more compartmentalized. There were Republicans and Democrats then like today. But by no means did we have this "gang warfare" mentality that we have seen seep into our politics.
People had their political leanings but these leanings weren't self-defining passions.

The media environment has done much to change our world. The 9/11 anniversary was guaranteed to bring the highly disturbing images of that day, a day filled with death, back to the forefront. How could we not watch?

I found it absolutely unconscionable that video of the WTC "jumpers" would be shown. But there it was. Some of this was so vivid that the identity of the jumpers could be pinned down by those close to them.

Can you imagine anything more horrifying? If nothing else, the media should have a moratorium of these particular images.

At least one network has been known to replay coverage of that morning as it happened. But why is this necessary?

If you stop and think for a moment, you'll realize this is largely media-driven. It's a quest for eyeballs. A big reason why the Jon Benet Ramsey murder became so sensationalized was "visuals." It was that footage of the girl in those little-girl beauty pageants.

On the weekend of that horrible goalpost incident here at the U of M-Morris, I received several phone calls from non-local media who were feverishly looking for visuals. In the days immediately following that incident, they struck out.
Eventually some video got into the possession of KSTP, so finally I could see what the heck happened. Was it good or bad that there was no video (or even still photos) in the immediate aftermath?
We can say it's good because, who needs to see a tragedy? But if the video was going to come out anyway, maybe it should have been made available immediately. Minus this, Morris just gets this image reinforced of being "in the middle of nowhere," the way Barnicle might put it.
We have always tried to shake that image.

I got calls from a very nice man with the Today Show. He probably had his bosses cracking the whip over him. Getting on the Today Show would also mean getting on MSNBC, the cable partner of NBC.

Full-page newspaper ads encouraged us to remember 9/11. I'd like to see a groundswell toward forgetting 9/11, at least forgetting the media-driven obsession with it. We can begin with the video of the "jumpers" which is such a no-brainer I shouldn't have to be writing this.

The newspapers of course are glad to take money from "sponsors" for those pages commemorating the tragedy. I took a glance at our own Morris dead-tree product and they were right on board, right on cue with the generic version. There in those little boxes were the names of the sponsoring businesses, businesses choosing to throw their money away on these ads known in the business as "signature ads" (or "sucker ads" among insiders in the newspaper trade).

Nothing good came of 9/11. We hear about the heroes of 9/11 and surely people did what they could in order to rescue etc., but the death toll of the day was beyond comprehension.

It was a day to bemoan our airline security. It was perhaps a day to question our "political correctness" in the sense that some "profiling" might help prevent such acts.
It was a day used by the neocons to start the puzzling war in Iraq.

We have seen dictatorships fall or come under intense siege of late in the "Arab spring." Maybe Iraq would have lined right up with these dominoes, had we just stayed out.

Oh, blood certainly would be spilled. But it wouldn't be blood of American soldiers.

Our conquests in that part of the world have bled us financially. Republicans are supposed to be the party of isolationism. But President George W. Bush had grand visions of spreading U.S. power. It was under the guise of doing good but it was really in an imperialist way.

What will history say about it?

We deserved sympathy on 9/11. I'm not sure our behavior since then will be viewed so generously. And the media's obsession ought to end although it probably won't.

Bush and Dick Cheney have their defenders on Fox News which has become one of the most curious phenomena of our new media age and ecosystem.

Fox News has harnessed all the scared anti-intellectual people out there. These are people who will advocate for political causes that are not in their own interests. Thomas Frank has written about this in "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

One of Barnicle's colleagues at MSNBC is Chuck Todd who has gotten caught in one of those typical and trivial media kerfuffles for our new age (and new ecosystem). Todd, who seems the most solid and poised newsperson, used absolutely innocuous language to describe some polling results recently.

Todd indicated that the network's pollsters were "concerned about the most recent poll numbers for the president."

The conservative ignoramuses in their foxholes cried "foul" at what they saw as bias. But how pathetically trivial.

Bill O'Reilly piled on from his hour-long TV soapbox. O'Reilly is one of the barking dogs of Fox News. He's a master craftsman of TV, above all else, who knows how to get viewers. He gets viewers the way the Andy Griffith character in "A Face in the Crowd" (the late 1950s movie) did.

Barnicle once famously said of O'Reilly: "I've known him for 25 years and he isn't the ogre as he is so often portrayed."

It was like someone explaining that professional wrestling isn't real. OK, I know that.

Of course when I write about O'Reilly, who will someday have to answer to his maker, I risk having his producer come out here and do an "ambush interview." Oh, that would be exciting. It's just that I doubt Jesse Watters would bother coming out this far into Flyoverland.

It would certainly bring excitement to our morning at McDonald's Restaurant, where of course only the most erudite expressions of political and social commentary are made. (Recently we discussed whether it's proper etiquette to use toilet paper for blowing your nose.)

So Jesse Watters, come on out. Please painstakingly formulate one of your questions, thrust your microphone in my face and watch me stammer. I'll be just another liberal victim. "Liberals" are truly the enemy of all that's good, right?

Chuck Todd probably used the word "concerned" (about those poll numbers) because any time the U.S. president's popularity is dipping, it might be a worrisome sign for the nation. Is this not rational thought?

Not when you're in that conservative foxhole, imagining bomb blasts all around you caused by those nasty, misguided "liberals," you know, those people who feel we need a compassionate government to ensure that people on the margins of society can still live a comfortable life.

Us aging boomers are going to end up on the margins if we don't look out. And yet so many of us have become "tea partiers" who sit on the edge of our couches and cheer for the likes of O'Reilly.
Again, "What's the matter with Kansas?"

It's hard to get worse than O'Reilly but Laura Ingraham is. I'd say she was delusional but for the fact she's just one of those "professional wrestlers" of cable TV news. She assumes an identity and hammers away with it.

She acts like an eyedropper full of "bias" might contaminate all of us. Of course there isn't so much as an eyedropper of bias on Fox News (her home on TV, same as O'Reilly and Watters).

Chuck Todd should have assumed, I guess, that it's a legitimate point of view to root against our president which by extension means rooting for bad things to happen in America. It would all be for the good, the Fox News barking dogs would suggest, because it would help those valiant, intelligent and heroic Republicans get elected.

Ingraham is the worst. She felt she had Chuck Todd cornered as if she were that dog character in "Cujo."

Now Watters would ask me why I called Ingraham a dog. My, what a world in which we live today.

Let's make it a world without such pervasive memories of 9/11.

God bless the victims and let's move on.

- Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com